Africa
Crowned Crane hunting at dawn, Lake Victoria
Hello from Africa!
I am here for two months working for a start up NGO called 1Room for two months here in Kisumu, Kenya. Just for a short background, 1Room is attempting to change the way secondary education is brought to rural areas. It's finding a unique, remote, and digital approach to the secondary school model, breaking the wheel and remaking it to work for those in non-traditional settings, by creating an entire school out of just one single room.
Dawn at Hippo Point on Lake Victoria
I was looking for internships one day online and spotted the need for help with business development and digital space and thought, that sounds just like what we practice in my program at Parsons, maybe I could help! The opportunity presented itself to speak with the founder, an MIT Ph.D. Candidate named Michael, and we really hit it off, he offered me the job, I got as much information as I could, had some skype meetings with other team members, ran a campaign on CrowdRise to gain funds for airfare, vaccines, and travel expenses (thank you so much to all my friends and family for donating! I wouldn't be here without you!), met my goal, moved out of my apartment in Brooklyn New York, put everything I own in storage, situated my lovely little lemon puppy at summer camp (aka my moms house in the Berkshires), bought my ticket and well....here I sit, in Kenya, surrounded by some of the most interesting and inspiring individuals, helping people gain access to education in a new way! As someone who has had a love hate relationship with the education system, it meant a lot to me to be part of attempting to remodel it. Not everyone learns by regurgitating information or copying down notes from a text book. That's not how the next generation of students will learn, and I'm glad I'm seeing first hand the testing process of this idea. I'm not a traditional student, I barely graduated high school, but I went on to learn at my own pace and put myself through two degrees and now graduate school. It goes to show you that you don't have to fit within the confines of tradition, you can carve your own path. I hope this program shows someone else that they can do the same. Well enough about that, and back to Africa.
Wild Hippos at Hippo Point on Lake Victoria
I arrived on Friday flying from New York to Doha, Qatar (which is one of the most beautiful airports I've ever seen! I would love to go back and see the city it seems lovely) from Qatar, to Nairobi, went through customs, got lost, got found, took a bus, and then flew from Nairobi to Kisumu. From Kisumu I was met by Pato, a fellow local volunteer working with the program. We got in a tuk-tuk around 6:30 pm, the sun was setting and the sky was so huge I've never seen so much sunset, it was like the whole earth was orange and the sun itself just looked larger than I'd seen it look anywhere else I've been in the world. We followed the dirt roads for about 20 minutes, getting out at the compound I'll be staying at for the first month of my trip.
The feed house at Kaguya Compound, Kisumu Kenya
It stands as a huge brick wall wrapping around the small road and down a plain on one side, with a gate and a security guard. He let us in and we walked past chickens, goats, cows, and wild dogs (which they asked me to please, stop petting, and to wash my hands immediately, oops... One guard even commented that they don't normally like people, ha! I must have a way with pups because this guy wouldn't stop licking my hand and following me around!) There are three houses on the compound, and land enough for all the animals and a barn, two wells, a wash room, and a slaughter house. I walked into our house to find our whole team, complete with four volunteers working in health on the other side of the city, about an hour away, who were staying for the weekend. Everyone was so friendly and kind, exactly as I expected them, ready to learn about me and what I would be bringing to the cause. I told them my background in art and music, how that spun off into getting a degree in digital media and design management, working in marketing, and how I found myself applying to graduate school to find out just how much design can do for larger companies and ideas, how ALL of that lead me to be found on a design career website and plucked from the masses to bring me to them! Isn't it crazy how that happens? Every step I took led me here, to be with these other people who are so much like me but in their own unique way. Each of us feeling compelled to take what we learned and bring it somewhere to maybe help someone else get to where they, in turn, are going. It blows my mind how all of us were living in our separate countries, separate cities, in our separate lives and each found our way here to each other to try and create something better for someone else.
A Fisherman on Lake Victoria
We had dinner, provided by our house helper Pamala, who speaks everything in Kiswahili first, and then in English, so we can practice. She also speaks Luo, which is another common language in this area of Kenya. We socialized and ended up traveling into the city to go to a dance hall, which was crazy, Kenyans can get DOWN. I fell asleep for a whole day after all of that and still feel a little exhausted just thinking about it, 24 hours of travel is just too much.
Africa is beautiful and wild.
-&