July 20, 2011

Over the last week, our group took a step back from the details of our project and community engagement and took a closer look at ourselves, which led me into reflecting on my initial motivation for coming to South Africa. The prospect of a more challenging study abroad is what drew me to ThinkImpact’s program, and I have indeed found myself confronted by unexpected challenges. The principle of “shared austerity” means that we must deal with a taste of adversity: the absence of running water, limited food variety, waking to roosters calling at dawn. It was jarring to find how many basic comforts Americans take for granted, but it has also been rewarding. I’ve developed a strong respect for people who live in this community, particularly due to their overwhelming positivity about their community. People of Clare simply don’t complain.

Seeing images of Sub-Saharan poverty in American media prepared me for a very different experience. Sub-Saharan Africa appears on American TV with images of fly-covered, stick-thin children. I found that I associated misery with poverty, but the face of poverty is drastically different. The people are warm, welcoming, and inviting, and no one can live their lives in abject misery. Indeed, their ingenuity in dealing with the challenges of life in rural Mpumalanga is exactly what we are here to build upon.

In the last two weeks, I’ve found myself excited by the opportunities for development in Clare, rather than depressed by its deficiencies. The level of existent development is surprising: between the positive outlook of the people and the level of access to electricity, water, and television, it’s tempting to forget how poor most of the village is. Poverty is most painfully manifested in the opportunities that people cannot pursue. They see a better life on TV and have many of the same dreams we do, and it’s heartbreaking how far a college education or a paying job can be from hardworking, talented individuals.

It’s striking, however, how quickly we’ve connected with people who live ten thousand miles away, in drastically different circumstances. I’ve been told that people will be what you expect them to be, no matter where you are, but I couldn’t have expected such warmth. The family from my home stay quickly welcomed my roommates and I as if we were family in truth, and they have gone to great lengths to make us feel at home. Our community partners have been very enthusiastic, and have been willing to answer all of our questions, even after two weeks.

The most striking difference one notices here is the sheer number of stars. “Tinyaleti” is the Xitsonga word for a multitude of stars, and it applies: they do blanket the sky here. Even the moon waxing the Milky Way cuts a faint line along the south, while the Southern Cross and the Centaur glow brightly. It’s comforting to think that under these unfamiliar stars, so many miles from my home, the people who live beneath them have such familiar hopes.

I knew I wanted to study abroad my junior year, but I wasn’t sure where. I didn’t even know Africa was an option. Eventually, I chose GESI because it offered a different kind of study abroad experience: living with a host family, interning at a local organization, and becoming fully immersed in a new culture. Plus, spending a summer in Africa? That was pretty cool in itself.

Describe your Experience
“Cool” doesn’t even begin to describe my seven weeks in Uganda. I remember how gradually I became a part of my host family, doing everything from cooking with my mother to washing clothes with my siblings to chatting about my Asian-American background with my father. I remember the market we helped set up, where all the village groups we were working with came together to sell their goods, paint their cooperatively-owned bank, and socialize (which involved singing, dancing, and a whole lot of “happy yelling”). I remember walking down Main Street in the middle of town and feeling no longer like an outsider, like I truly belonged there.

What will you take away from your GESI experience?

From this experience I learned that people– college students at that– really have the capacity to make change, even if it means starting at the grassroots with local communities and organizations. It wasn’t easy by all means, but I feel better equipped now to handle the challenges that come with working in unfamiliar settings. If you like the challenge, then I highly recommend GESI!

I chose GESI because I wanted to get outside of my comfort zone. The idea of living with another family, in a country I had never been to, appealed to my “I want to challenge myself” side. I had already heard about the program from several upperclassmen, all of who are some of the coolest, most genuine people I had met at NU. The projects I heard about seemed inventive and hands-on, and after hearing so much about different development methods in classes at Northwestern and having grown up with both of my parents working in international development, I wanted to experience “development” for myself. I also had several commitments during the school year and couldn’t afford to take a quarter off of school, so summer allowed me to experience study abroad without having to sacrifice anything.

Finally, I am half Indian, and unfortunately my experience with that side of my heritage while growing up consisted of trips to Indian restaurants every month or so. I wanted to connect with a part of my own culture that I never had before and really connect with people with who I had just as much in common (at least, genetically) as my American friends.

Describe your Experience

For the 8 weeks our lives were based in Udaipur, a city in the state of Rajasthan, arguably one of the most romantic states within India. Known for its deserts, colorful turbans, palaces of pink and blue, and strong dynastic lines, Rajasthan (literally translated to the “land of kings”) was so culturally rich that it would have been hard to avoid learning about Indian heritage.

Our NGO, the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), was professional and well prepared for our time with them, which made us feel confident to leave our work behind when we left India. Our group met with the residents of nine rural villages and guided them in creating asset maps, which documented the villages’ social and physical resources. FES had never worked in this area before, and wanted a comprehensive assessment of different issues in each village. We also decided to come up with a project that FES could carry out after we left India to more directly benefit community members. After narrowing down project ideas and locations — using size, willingness and other factors — we chose to supply smokeless stoves and compost pits to two villages. Smokeless stoves channel smoke to the outdoors instead of allowing it to build up inside where it can be harmful to the health of women (who predominantly make meals inside). The stoves also use less wood, decreasing fuel consumption and preserving forest resources. Compost pits enable farmers to decrease their use of chemical fertilizers and increase crop yield.

What will you take away from your GESI experience?

Someone mentioned in our pre-India program that they were excited because a true test of who you are can really happen when you are placed in a situation where you are uncomfortable and not adjusted. That was true for me. It also made me appreciate my own family’s culture more — previously, I hadn’t really taken names for certain members of my family seriously, like mami for my mother’s brother’s wife opposed to masi for my mother’s sister. Little things like that, I know I will respect more now.

Also, GESI completely confused me about international development, in a good way. With so many ideas thrown at me, I have much more information. I have different viewpoints, different ideas and different experiences to help me make my own opinions. I recommend GESI because it’s a chance to do something rather than just regurgitate or memorize information. It’s unlike most study abroad experiences because you are in charge of what you are doing, and the hypotheticals that you were once told to think about in some international politics class could become a reality.

GESI was featured on the front page of the most recent Northwestern Research Newsletter! The article tracks the success and growth of GESI from the original Engage Uganda program to what GESI is today: an innovative service-learning experience that this summer sent over forty students to ten different community-based organizations on three different continents.

The excitement generated by the creativity and passion of GESI 2009 participants in Argentina, Uganda, and India is reflected in the descriptions of their projects. The article highlights our team that worked with the Organization for Rural Development (ORUDE) in Uganda, who this summer facilitated a mushroom-growing project to generate income and improve nutrition among an HIV/AIDS affected community. Another GESI 2009 team visited semi-isolated tribal villages in India and led the villagers in a participatory mapping activity that assessed the status of healthcare, education, and a number of other issues in their community. One of the teams in Argentina developed strong relationships with the staff of their NGO as they worked together to raise awareness about adults with disabilities in their community as well as enrich the lives of the disabled adults that the NGO serves.

The GESI values of engagement and sustainability are also features of the article. As Nicole Patel, GESI Program Manager stresses: “Our program is not about going abroad and enrolling in a local university… It’s about getting your hands dirty and working directly on issues that affect the community every day.” GESI projects are meant to emerge from the community itself and be long-term endeavors: “All of the groups strive to create projects that will have a lasting effect…We know that projects succeed when community members have ownership. We also want students to understand that development is not promoted when an outsider comes in with a quick fix. It’s a long process with many stakeholders.”

Click here to check out the full article!

Often times people ask me if students can really make a difference on these short term trips. It’s an important question, and one that I don’t take lightly. I’ve seen many short term projects fall apart and make negative impacts in the local community. When done well, though, a short term experience does a couple of incredibly important things:

1. Change the students: These experiences open the eyes of students to a new reality, equip them to create change, and send them back to their home country with a passion for an under-served place and a better sense of how they can impact global change from whatever sector they enter.

2. Change the community: A well-done student project both makes a short-term difference in the community, and acts as a catalyst for community development in the local community. It initiates conversations that may not otherwise have happened, enhances the capacity of key community members to make an impact, and develops processes for change that long outlive the students’ presence.

3. Lead to larger initiatives: Sometimes, students stay deeply connected to their host organization and come back to work with the community to expand projects. I am personally inspired by two recent university graduates who were delegates at the first year of our Global Engagement Summit and have gone on to do incredible work in Kenya and Mali. Andy Cunningham of Duke University is now back in Kenya as Executive Director of the WISER project after a research trip with Dr. Sherryl Broverman in the summer of 2006. He is helping start the first model all-girls secondary boarding school and community center in Muhuru Bay, Kenya. You can watch parts of the groundbreaking ceremony and the first women’s soccer game here.

Caitlin Cohen of Brown has been working in Mali with the Mali Health Organizing Project to help 60,000 people in slum communities learn to design, implement, and evaluate their own health care solutions as well as organize to get government to invest in their health. MHOP has had a huge impact, as well as gotten some impressive media exposure: Caitlin was named one of the top 9 youth activists in the USA by DoSomething.org, and Doritos put her and MHOP on Nacho Doritos bags (100 million of them). Not bad for a 22 year old.

Over break I finally picked up a book that CGE’s founder, Nathaniel has been trying to get me to read for years. And for good reason. Bury the Chains is an incredibly well-written account of the efforts of a few activists’ relentless and ingenious campaign to end the British slave trade– the first and most successful human rights movement of the early modern era. I have found it personally inspiring and convicting, eager to explore how to apply lessons from this movement to current day issues.

Much of what we now we consider basic advocacy techniques come from the strategies of Thomas Clarkson and the other activists at the core of the movement: petitions, boycotts, informative pamphlets, eye-witness interviews, images and life stories of victims, etc. These techniques both made the horrors of the slave trade real in the eyes of British citizens and legislators, as well as provided simple, practical ways for any person to get involved. For example, women, who couldn’t vote at the time, played a significant role in boycotting slave-produced slavery.

This post gives a short glimpse of the highlights of the book and elaborates on what we have to learn about social entrepreneur Thomas Clarkson. Below is a an excerpt– a list of what today’s social entrepreneurs and human rights activists can learn from Clarkson:

1. He built upon the work of others. The first thing Clarkson did after committing to his mission was to reach out to other, more experienced mentors who could help him determine the best way to undertake the great challenge of changing British society and policy.
2. He helped people find ways to contribute to the cause that reflected the specific types of and limitations of the power they had. Petitions, consumer boycotts, direct government advocacy were all important parts of the abolitionist movement’s strategy, and provided a variety of opportunities for people to get involved, even if they didn’t have the right to vote directly.
3. He found key allies. Clarkson simply could not have done his work without allies, particularly the Quakers who provided a language and a moral force for tackling the issue and William Wilberforce, who’s indefatigable willingness to press for legislation banning the slave trade slowly eroded the British parliaments will.
4. He understood the power of testimony and story. Clarkson was a collector. He brought together testimonies from slaves and slave ship captains with actual visuals – diagrams of slave ships and instruments of captivity – to create emotionally visceral appeals. As scholar Adam Hochschild has put it, “the abolitionists succeeded because they mastered one challenge that still faces anyone who cares about economic and social justice: drawing connections between the near and the distant.”
5. He didn’t give up. In some ways, building public support was easier than changing actual policy. The economic power behind the slave trade was strong, and had powerful access to Members of Parliament. What’s more, the rise of the abolitionist movement coincided with the French revolution, instigating a general Parliamentary fear of mass movements. It would have been easy for Clarkson and his allies to simply cede their efforts, but they persisted. Perhaps most telling, when the slave trade was finally banned in 1807, Clarkson did not retire his organizing. He spent the next three decades advocating for workers rights and mentoring a new generation of abolitionist leaders who would help abolish slavery itself

The Global Engagement Summer Institute is part of a much larger trend of undergraduate and graduate students looking to be more globally engaged and of entrepreneurs within universities developing programs to facilitate just that. To read more about this trend and others shaping the world of social entrepreneurship– such as mobile technology and measuring social impact– check out CGE founder Nathaniel Whittemore’s blog on change.org as he counts down to the new year.

One of the social entrepreneurs that I’ve found incredibly compelling in reading through the highlights of the Dowsr interviews (see previous post) is Gillian Caldwell, Executive Director of WITNESS

WITNESS is quite creative in the way that it uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. It harnesses individual creativity, skill, and resourcefulness by providing a platform where people can post videos of human rights violations for others to see and use for advocacy purposes, thus the slogan: “See it, film it, change it.” This interview with Caldwell gives insight into the organization and her own way of viewing her work. I particularly appreciate her call to live out your values, to embody both passion, persistence, and humility, and to allow your team/organization the space and environment of collective conversation to design a strategy for the organization.

Also, a few major themes from her Dowsr interview:

- Organizations need clarity of vision, which then allows you to build towards and measure success

- She recognizes that her relentlessness is a double edged sword and has a strong understanding of what feeds her soul

- She wants her organization to be seen “as dynamic; as well-organized; as effective; as enabling; youthful; energetic; evolving”

Dowsr is an open web platform for people to share stories that inspire positive action, provide practical ‘how-to’ insights, connect potential colleagues and – above all – provide a solution-oriented view of the world that highlights the growing landscape of creative social innovation. Dowsr was founded by author David Bornstein (“How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas”) and is a project of Civic Ventures.

I’ve found David Bornstein’s responses to FAQs about social entrepreneurs and his book, “How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas” quite compelling and a great place to start thinking about social entrepreneurship. I particularly appreciate his conviction that everyone has the capacity and potential to create change in the world and that if society at large encouraged social entrepreneurship more, “it would unleash enormous potential.” He notes that though social entrepreneurs aren’t without their own self doubts, “they take initiative, they listen to their instincts and they take action. Above all, they begin.” We hope this summer will be a chance for many of you to begin.