By Anita Deeg-Carlin, Director of Intercultural Learning and Global Engagement Minor
Safari njema! Have a good trip! Bursting with emotion, we waved goodbye to our new Kenyan friends last Monday, and headed off to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to start our long journey back to Wes. It’s a long story that will probably take us the rest of our lives to unpack! What is transformational education? How do we provide opportunities for students to step back from their world views and gain a broader lens? I’m sure each of us has a different answer, but there will likely be one common word: discomfort. We have to leave the safety of our cultural comfort zones to challenge our assumptions and widen our perspectives. This is a key tenet of Wesleyan’s Global Engagement Minor and what we set out to do this spring break with the CGST 206 course: Global Engagement in Practice, Swahili Language and NGO Case Study in Kenya.
We had the amazing opportunity to travel to Nairobi to partner with education NGO Kenya Education Fund (KEF) during their annual “CREW” Mentorship workshop. High school in Kenya means boarding school; boarding school means school fees that are out of reach for many families, particularly in the vast rural counties. KEF provides scholarships to students based on need and merit. CREW stands for Career Readiness, Reproductive Health and Entrepreneurship Workshop, and brings together recent KEF high school graduates and KEF alumni to equip students with the practical skills, confidence, and guidance they need to transition into higher education, careers, and independent life. This year, eight GEM students got to join this vibrant, high energy, high impact, non-stop marathon of preparing 140+ students from a huge diversity of backgrounds for university life. They gave it their all!
Former trustee Andrew Fairbanks ’90 collaborated with KEF Executive Director Dominic Muasya to initiate and support the idea of partnering Wesleyan students with this organization. Anita Deeg-Carlin and her Global Engagement Minor agreed to host the project and embed it in a new course that splits instruction between introductory Swahili instruction and content preparation for the region. Prior to our trip, we learned from African experts in our network about regional art history, politics, demographics, geography, philosophy and history. During our trip, and beginning unfortunately early every morning, we danced, we ate, we danced, we learned, we networked, we researched, we danced again. Accompanied by West African Dance professor, Iddrisu Saaka, and Vice President for Equity and Inclusion, Dr. B (Willette Burnham-Williams), we navigated the many daily impromptu stage appearances, small group conversations, excursions, moments with microphones, and outdoor activities, and then circled up at night to “briefly” process our experiences. You can imagine, brief never meant less than 60 minutes!
Highlights? There are so many. Visiting Kennedy Odede’s ’12 and Jessica Posner’s ’09 legendary SHOFCO organization was surreal. We’d read their book, Find Me Unafraid, and now got the chance to see the now expansive organization in action. What started with a Davis Project for Peace grant awarded here on campus now affects 1.2 million Kenyans. It was humbling to see what a Wesleyan education can do. Students also got to meet ChezaCheza and Afrocure, two phenomenal organizations run by local youth to empower children with dance in Kibera, an enormous informal settlement often referred to as the “largest slum in Africa.” Their ability to dance was mind blowing! “All we have is our bodies,” was a profound statement we heard. We had the rare opportunity to meet the family of a KEF student who lives in traditional Maasailand with their beloved herds of goats and cattle. Dripping with intricately beaded jewelry, the student’s moms and aunties poured us traditional medicinal broth and served us fresh goat meat stew. What a gift. But if you ask any of our eight students what their most meaningful memories are, they are likely to refer to conversations with their new friends, the mentors and students of KEF who laughed, played, worked, discussed, and danced with them often til the wee hours of the morning, sharing their cultural backgrounds and perspectives and exploring common themes in their lives from diverse perspectives. One mentor is a documentary maker and activist who laid his life on the line for the youth movement in Kenya. Concepts like democracy, activism, and networking take on a whole new meaning when you’re in the presence of that kind of courage and conviction and hope.
For Anita, the trip leader, it was a full circle experience. As a junior in college, she came to Nairobi for a visit during her 6-month internship in Uganda. The impact of that experience many years ago fueled her creation of this course, and to see similar seeds planted in this group of students was unspeakably rewarding. For Lois Amponsah ’27, Ry De Guzman ’28, Anna Li ’28, Isaías Pagan de Jesus ’26, Aubrey Piton ’28, Ama Tuffour ’26, Molly Volker ’26, and Kaya Waltzer ’26, their stories are theirs to tell. I assure you, they are worth hearing. Next time you see one of them, ask- I promise, you’ll be inspired.
Want to get involved? Reach out to Anita at adeegcarlin@wesleyan.edu.