Jul 2008

We flew over the Atlantic Ocean and Europe in a single bounce, watched the flight plan dip south on the monitors to avoid Israeli and Iraqi airspace, left our daily comforts and easy routines as far behind as our time zones, and then, in Dubai en route to Kayanga, Tanzania, we were only halfway into our journey. I think it’s fair to ask – why are we doing this?

It’s about curiosity, excitement, mission, and growth. The mission is to both serve and learn deeply about service. We’ll be constructing water harvesting systems for Amizade’s community partners in Kayanga, Tanzania, but we’ll also be learning about successes and failures in development history, visiting one of the UN’s 12 Millennium Development Villages in Africa, learning what the US Embassy has to say about development and – most importantly – listening to our local partners’ experiences and perspectives. The Water Systems will sustain access to clean water in a region where many people walk hours each day for access to what is in the end often dirty and insufficient water. The learning will help us sharpen our lenses in analyzing and understanding development and its history, will help us be better communicators in numerous intercultural contexts, and will help us better understand the connections between our living, learning, and values.

The excitement and curiosity relate to where we’ll be doing this. It’s enthralling and engaging to be at the edge of the map. After driving a day from Kampala to the far Southwestern corner of Uganda we’ll be visiting Ruhira, a mountainous and remote village targeted for intensive development by the UN, in cooperation with Columbia University’s Earth Institute under the leadership of Jeffrey Sachs. From there we’ll make another day’s trip over land, this time skimming by the border of Rwanda, crossing into Tanzania at an outpost so remote that it has made neither Let’s Go’s list of border crossings nor even the roads indentified on Lonely Planet’s map. After crossing in that under-reported space, we’ll travel on to Kayanga, Tanzania, the hometown of our community partners and the community at the end of the energy grid in that part of Karagwe, far Northwestern Tanzania. We’ll be there about three weeks before moving on to Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam.

Finally this journey is about growth. It’s about growth for each of the students who is taking part in this 6-credit Political Science course through Amizade and West Virginia University. They’ll experience various kinds of growth in terms of how they understand the world and how they see themselves and their culture, their status, their money, and their experiences to date. It’s about growth for Amizade and WVU, deepening relations to our partners in Tanzania. It’s about growth in cooperation and access to water and growth for women who will no longer need to hike hours everyday for basic water access. And it’s about growth for me, continuing to learn from these experiences, from community partners, from students, and from all of our attempts, learning, and improvements at cooperating across cultures through service. We’re moving on to Ruhira.