Outsider in Zambia

When I decided to take the IDIN grant to travel and work abroad, I was not at all sure about what to expect from the experience. I asked my placement coordinator where my skills might be best utilized and most needed, and was immediately pointed to Kafue Innovation Center in Kafue, Zambia among others. I spoke to John, one member of 3 at KIC, soon after, and his excitement and interest in having me was overwhelming. I began looking at flights that same day.

About 2 weeks after beginning to work in Kafue, I spoke to John regarding how he thought things were going and felt about the work I was doing. I felt that I had been doing a good job of getting through what was asked of me and learning everything I possibly could about KIC, the projects, and future possibilities. He agreed, but he also wanted to encourage me to take more of a leadership role and share more of my opinions on everything I was learning about the center. Essentially, he wanted me to get tough with them. I was really glad to have that feedback, but also a bit uncomfortable. Thanks to my previous coursework in international development, the fact that actions and even simple suggestions may often have unintended consequences in this field was not lost on me. I was hesitant to cross the line between consciously doing no harm and making unique contributions even though that was why I had come. Moreover, without classmates, expert instructors, and a degree of separation that previously made real world problems seem more inviting than urgent, I felt extremely alone. 

Going from the classroom where stakeholder feedback and interactions are much fewer to basically unlimited access was quite overwhelming. My notebooks were inundated with new ideas and insights, but I was hesitant to pursue or even propose them without feeling more secure in my knowledge and understanding of the assumptions I was making and their ramifications. After talking to John, however, I realized misusing the best resource I had access to: the people I worked with at the innovation center every day. 

I came to Zambia acutely aware of my outsider-ness and actively avoided falling into any undesirable power dynamic. My friends at KIC helped me understand that they understood this concern and could handle it. They weren’t looking for an outsider to open up a whole new world of insights for them, but a contributor to bring useful feedback to the table for consideration. I didn’t stop assessing my assumptions, but I realized that picking them apart to the level I had been really impeded my progress. I think this is where my experiences in the classroom and working in Zambia completely diverged. I had become so used to attempting not to lead stakeholders to any particular conclusions about what I was presenting to them, that I forgot to even let my partners in. I wasn’t used to having so much access to them, and it took time for me to take advantage of what they had to offer.

I Guess I'm a Maverick Now?

I spent the week of July 18 shirking my work. Why? Because Agastya was hosting an international teachers' summit, and I was asked to be a participant!

The event: Maverick Teachers Global Summit. The people: 30 or so incredible teachers from around the world, and several educational "thought leaders," with a special emphasis on inviting Indian educators. The goal: to develop curricula and teaching tools to help educate about and solve specially selected global challenges, inspired by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

7 teams of educators working for one week on specially chosen problems, trying to build empathy with global students, designing educational materials and prototyping/piloting them with children at Agastya's campus. In other words?

The Oliner's Natural Environment. (Or, at the very least, mine!)

I was lucky enough to be on the Gender Equality team. We were the largest team by far (10 people!), but we also had one of the largest problems that the summit had selected: how can we design a curriculum that promotes gender equality throughout society? I was happy to be on such a stellar global team: we had three people from the U.S. (including myself), two from Finland, one from Chile, and four from right here in India (four women and six men, if you're wondering). The great part about having such a big team was a diversity of opinion and thought, which was a strength that we tried to leverage to make a gender equality learning plan that would be relevant to children everywhere (that is, something that would be culturally adaptable).

Go Gender, Go Gender, Go Gender, Equality! (PC Prianka)

Our team, truly global (again, PC Prianka)!

Immediately, we were struck at the vast differences in experience of gender inequality. The defining characteristics of what it looks like in different countries is hugely variable, from the U.S, where the popular gender inequality discussions of the day are centered around Lean In, STEM education (2nd link), Hillary Clinton, and #yesallwomen, to India, where sexual violence is (Trigger Warning on this link) being described as an epidemic, but women seem to be doing better in STEM careers (happy link, click away).

So where, then, do we begin? What is the unifying factor in these experiences? I found my own answer to this from a local thirteen-year-old boy I spoke with, who said he had never spoken with anybody about gender inequality. Once we had established that he did understand what gender inequality was, I asked him what he thought the source was. And he pretty quickly responded: "The gents have all the power. The ladies have no power." He also gave me a more-local reason: "The parents respect their sons more than they respect their daughters."

Wow. So the kids get it. They know that they live in a world deeply affected by gender inequality, and they know why. So our team decided to create a lesson in which students can bring their own experiences and viewpoints to the table, speak critically about gender for what may well be the first time, and be introduced to the concept of gender-based violence.

Most of the materials that we made will be posted online soon (hopefully!), so I won't go into details here, but I think we laid some groundwork for what will hopefully be a culturally adaptable curriculum, for all ages, that is as relevant to students in Europe as those in South Asia, and everywhere in-between. I believe that we took a major step toward this goal when I heard the students we worked with commit to change for the better. We had them write a small "promise to act" on a piece of paper, something that they could do to try to make the world a little more equal in regards to gender. I leave you with what one student wrote.

"We should treat all the children as our brothers and sisters.
We should have a good attitude to one another.
We should not do wrong things to one another.
We should never degrade another person."

The conference was fun, the team was great, the curriculum we designed was interesting. But I hope that the change we affect is better.

The above quote as originally written, in Kannada. (seriously, the last one, PC Prianka!)

Bio Discovery at Agastya (and my first few weeks in India)

Hey y'all! I'm Mitch, and I'm an Electrical and Computer Engineering student at Olin. I'm spending the summer at the Agastya International Foundation, near Gudivanka, Andhra Pradesh, India. It's an educational NGO, and is really focused on hands-on and investigative-based learning. This post is mostly an introduction to myself and the work I'm doing, so it'll be a bit long I think.

The campus itself is a huge (172 acres) ecology park in a rural area, where the buildings and curricula are integrated with nature. It's also quite modern, focused on teaching math, science, and engineering to local students to augment their normal education. The whole feeling of the place is one of dualisms, especially between the energy of the hundreds of kids that come every day and the calming natural environment that surrounds and permeates it. I heard one of my professors describe the campus as "pastoral;" that's an apt description, but it seems to leave out some indescribable quality of the air, the kids, the teachers, and the weather. I'd add to it, "invigorating."

I work in the Bio Discovery program here. I say "in," but I really mean "with" or "for." You see, unlike many programs here, the Bio Discovery program has no buildings yet. It's a new program, and they hope to have their first building complete within the next year, ending with (I think) ten buildings to teach kids biology in an engaging, memorable, and high-quality way. The whole center is to have five components: Let's Investigate, The Sensorium, Learning Gardens, Mechanics of Movement, and Genetics. I'm here as a prototyping intern, so my work is mostly centered around building physical models and interactive demonstrations in each of these components.

So far, I've been engaged in 3 projects. The first of these is with another intern here, Katie, and has most utilized my electrical engineering skills. It's to make an interactive demonstration that shows how somatic reflex arcs work. The general idea of the demonstration is that an instructor will press a button on a model of an arm or leg, and lights will engage in sequence to represent neurons firing, up the limb, to the spinal cord, and back to the limb. Finally, the limb will jerk in some way, demonstrating that the muscle responded to the stimulus. I've been focused on what circuitry we need to make such a demonstration simple, effective, and durable.

The second is a special goggles that children will wear to invert their vision. This is a part of the Sensorium, and the goggles themselves will be a fun way for students to better understand the relationships between our senses and our brains' processing of those senses (relevant link). The design of the goggles is really "just enough" to hold special prisms in front of the children's eyes, so I don't anticipate this particular project taking very much time.

The third project is the big one that will take most of my summer: designing and building Mechanics of Motion models. The idea is that students will be able to physically interact with some sort of demonstration or exhibit (think science museum), and see how particular motions in the body occur. To begin, I'm working on a lever-pulling demonstration, where students will see the muscles and joints involved in pulling a lever (encompassing radial abduction of the wrist, flexion of the forearm, and extension of the arm), and in pushing that lever (the opposite motions: ulnar abduction, forearm extension, arm flexion). The general idea of the demonstration is that it will be mostly passive (i.e. not electrical), a mechanical system, and that it will show bones and muscles working together. I haven't quite worked out all the details, but it should be an exciting exhibit when I'm done! After this particular motion is finished, I plan to work on a few more motion demonstrations to varying degrees of completeness. I hope I can finish at least one or two before I leave!

India itself has taken some getting used to, but I'm adapting quickly. I certainly echo much of what Aaron said in a previous post about the experience of being the only white person around (save some of my fellow interns). I'm enjoying the pace of life here at Agastya, and their unique outlook on education. I'm hoping to learn as much as I can before I return to Olin.

Vidkolu,
Mitch

I Did Not Come to Africa to Help the Children

“I just really wanted to come to Africa help the children”, I hear the white girl across from me say. She pushes her straight blonde hair back over her left ear and lays her RayBan sunglasses on the plastic table. She sits in a blue plastic chair with “Pepsi” written on the back, under a tent that leans such that it looks as if it could topple at any moment. On the wall across her is a bare cement building with “Chakula House” in colorful paint on the wall and written again on the Pepsi-branded sign. On both sides of the long table sit Tanzanian men and women, eating wali, ugali and mshikaki. “Chips”, she says to the young woman with an apron who walks up next to her. “Chips, you understand?” she repeats. The woman nods her head.

From my quick interaction I am already forming her backstory. She comes from California, just out of college. She has always wanted to go to Africa, doesn’t really matter where, since last year when her friend went. On the weekdays she goes to orphanages and hospitals where she plays with the kids and unsuccessfully tries to teach them english. On the weekends she goes on safari, lounges by the pool, and goes to all the clubs. Her Instagram is a mix between her with the little children with captions about how happy they are even though their situation is so tragic, and selfies with elephants. Her profile picture is her in the middle a group of African (she doesn’t specify the country) kids. She is White Savior Barbie. She is everything I complain about to my other mzungu friends.

View up the road

But am I all that different? I am in Tanzania for two months, I go out on the weekends, post pictures of landscapes on Instagram, and speak a few words of broken Swahili. I like to think I came to Arusha to do something that mattered and get experience in international development, but I am also having a good time living in another country. There are no doubt things that separate me from her. I am not pretending I know what is best for Tanzania, I take the bus and ride my bike through the local entrance of the national park, I live without many of the luxuries of home, and my profile picture is not of me with a group of Tanzanian children. I want to believe that I am not a “white savior”, but there is a part of me is not sure and it makes my stomach hurt.

Lake Manyaya National Park

One night, after a long talk about what were were really doing in Tanzania, my friend said to me, “The people who are thinking abut the things and questioning if they are really making a difference are usually the ones that are.” So hopefully, by recognizing that I have the privilege to be able to go here (and the privilege to leave whenever I want), that I am not a savior, and that I do not know what is best for Tanzania, I don't have to be like the girl sitting across from me. It is okay for me to go to Tanzania for a summer. It is okay for me to have an experience where I learn about international development, do my best to help, and even go on small trips on the weekends. But I did not just really want to come to Africa to help the children.

A Crazy Day in Bogota: or Fear is Overrated.

So, this week I nearly gave myself a heart attack, which as a healthy twenty-one year old filled with vim and vigor really shouldn’t be possible. So let me explain about how this strange occurrence almost came to fruition. On Friday morning I got into a taxi with one of my mentor/hosts/bosses (we really need to come up with titles at some point) in order to buy giant barrels for my aquaponic system. I knew that we were going to have to cross some of the worst neighborhoods in town in order to get to the region where all of materials and workshops were located. There have been a spate of robberies here where someone is using a smartphone in a taxi and has someone wrench open the door and grab their phone. So, being a cautious tourist, I was wearing my coat with my wallet and phone on the inside pockets. I was pretty safe, I thought. I have been becoming much more comfortable here having seen no violence or theft and the only indication that I not in a fully developed country being a high instance of homeless people which can be found in any American city as well as a great deal of trash that is not picked up.

Colombian Bin Laden*

We drove through the horrifically paved streets past regions I was starting to get to know and finally turned a corner at which point I could feel myself sink down into my seat slightly. There was a man in full cammo (not the uniform of the colombian military or police) up ahead carrying what looked like an AK47 or M5. With recent events in Nice and around the world, I instantly panicked thinking that maybe he was stopping cars looking for Americans. Once again, I cursed my blond hair and clothes that stand out as not being from around here. This whole time I was trying not to look like I was panicking. I’m supposed to be brave and not judge people based on their appearance, but this man looked like every person that media and culture had taught me to demonize and fear. I mean, he looked exactly like Osama Bin Laden which I could see because at this point he was knocking on our window. My eyes were certainly wide enough to take in his beard and turban and I pressed myself away from the window. My host, Alex, waved him off and we drove on. Alex leaned over and said, “Just by the way, his gun is made out of wood.” I think I breathed a sigh of relief audible in space. It turns out that that man is an Osama Bin Laden impersonator and people here pay money to have their pictures taken with him. Decide for yourself if you would have reacted seeing this man walking towards you on a street somewhere. I not completely proud of my reaction, but I'm glad I didn't say anything or do anything too embarrassing or judgmental.

Tejo board with pink gunpowder packets**

All was well and good until I went out that night with a coworker and the Colombian women’s lacrosse team (my coworker plays on the team and invited me to join them). We were going to play Tejo, a traditional Colombian game something like corn-hole, along with the coaches they’d flown in from the U.S. I’m pretty sure I was brought in to help the Americans (the ones from the U.S. not the South Americans. How much hubris do we have saying that we’re American?) feel a little less isolated. We walked into this tiny bar and grabbed beers at which point I heard a gunshot from right behind me in the bar. I jumped along with all the other Americans and looked wildly round at a cheerfully laughing group of Colombians. With all the shootings in the U.S., I’ve started to build up a fear muscle whenever I’m in public. The good news is that a) I wasn’t shot in a bar in Colombia, and b) that tejo is played with small packets of gunpowder similar to pop-its. The game centers around throwing a heavy weight at a board covered in clay which has a metal target ring on it and four gunpowder filled packets placed on the ring. If you are lucky, you get your weight into the middle or manage to hit one of the gunpowder packets with a sound remarkably similar to a gunshot. After jumping the first couple of times, we managed to loudly proclaim tejo anytime someone actually managed to hit one of the packets which between that and the thirty rack of beer we were required to drink with our game stopped us jumping very quickly. It was one of the most pleasant nights of my life.

On a less terrifying note, the next day I helped out at an event for kids who needs prosthesis. The Men upstairs work on prosthesis for kids and needed someone to help with an activity for the parents and other parts of the family while the kids were learning how to use minecraft, cad, and figuring out self-narratives. It was one of those experiences where while it is in progress, you know you are doing something worth doing (something we all strive for, but don’t always find in day-to-day activities).

*Image credit Getty Images. Link to article about the Man here

**Image credit to Uncover Colombia

Three Weeks In

Where do I stand after three weeks in Colombia. Well, this past Saturday I had my first workshop here. Among other things, I got to learn that most people don’t use tools as quickly as I do. I had a blast making a miniature lending library for a prototype and display purposes. We’re going to put it outside as soon as we can buy a means of attaching it to the wall. Things have a way of running away here if they’re not bolted down. Another intern showed up and we have decided that we have the solemn responsibility of placing C-innova on firmer footing than we found it. To this end, we’re recording lot’s of propaganda videos and are going to launch a GoFundMe.

My Little Lending Library

There are certainly a few interesting aspects to crowdfunding that I had never considered before. For instance, GoFundMe requires that you be an American citizen with an American bank account. I can only surmise this is for insurance purposes and to stop embargoed countries from getting money throw these sorts of sites. As thankfully both the other intern and I are American citizens with American bank accounts we can do this a crowdfunding, although this does raise a point about opportunity distribution. C-innova had actually considered doing crowdfunding before but found they couldn’t do it due to these considerations.

One of the things C-innova would really like to have is a station to learn about electrical engineering because right now they really only have the ability to take on design and mechanical engineering projects. My fellow intern and I also noticed a discrepancy in the number of diy videos that are filmed in Spanish versus the number that are in English. We’d like to leave some amount of equipment here that they can continue to use. Finally, C-innova would really like to be able to take its message out of Bogota. Right now the workshop is stuck in a room in Bogota and they’d like to be able to drive around to schools and towns that are not nearby. Towards these goals, we’re working on a hilarious video for our crowdfund campaign. Let’s just say, I have an incredible Hillary Clinton impersonation.

In any event, life here is beginning to take on a familiar form. My favorite place to grab lunch now knows my order by heart and I have finally gotten the hang of the cheek to cheek kissy thing (this is after I made a rather hilarious mistake by missing and accidentally kissing this lady’s shoulder,...she was very confused). I find now also that my thoughts seem to be in a variety of Spanish and English which is fun, but not totally coherent. It works because most of the people around me speak both so our conversations tend to go in and out of both languages. I was even complimented on my accent this week. Apparently, it now takes me messing up a particularly simple verb for people to realize that spanish isn’t my first language, which I do on a regular basis (I wouldn’t want to be too predictable…).

The last thing I’d like to say here is that I’ve learned a new definition of the word waste. While using tons of packaging doesn’t draw attention, if you leave a single morsel of edible food on your plate you will get a talking to, either by people with you wondering what’s wrong with you, or the waiter wanting to know what was wrong with the food. I also haven’t been warm since I got here. I work in two shirts or a shirt and coat because they don’t seem to heat buildings. I suppose since there are no seasons here they just figure that people can manage on particularly cold days. I now understand completely about why people here drink so much hot chocolate and coffee besides the fact that it’s very cheap. They also don’t seem to believe in heating water past lukewarm, which at first was very frustrating and then I realized just how much energy they’re saving. According to Energy.gov water heating accounts for 18% of a homes energy usage in the U.S. leaving me to wonder how much energy we’d save if everyone was okay with lukewarm water, not that I think we’ll ever convice people to do that. Hasta Luego, muchachos.

So, What Am I Doing?

I want to take a quick break from travel writing to quickly explain what I am doing in Tanzania. As part of a placement through the Olin IDIN fund, I am working at Twende in Arusha, Tanzania for two months this summer. Twende is a social innovation center that works to empower local innovators to solve challenges they see in their communities. We work to accomplish this through hands-on workshops and projects. We also provide support for businesses and developing social ventures.

The workshop.

But enough about that, back to me. I am working primarily in the (2 person) design team. As the director of creativity (self-appointed title), I work to provide design support for both the Twende center itself, and for the innovators that are working on projects or businesses. I have recently been working on designing a book to highlight Twende’s CCB (Creative Capacity Building) workshop, as well as graphic design for a business operating out of Twende. Throughout it all, I have been documenting the various work that goes on at Twende through photo and video. On the more human-centered design side, I have been working on improving the workshop space, and planing for Nane Nane (a large festival that happens in the beginning of August).

A view inside.

It is safe to say that this summer experience has been unlike most. When deciding whether to take an opportunity more in my comfort zone or to come here, I took a leap of faith. It has paid off so much more than I could have hoped for. Not only am I working somewhere where I can have a real, meaningful impact on the lives of others, but I have also grown so much as a person and gotten to know myself much better. I would recommend everyone that can take this kind of opportunity whenever possible. It has been a wonderful learning experience so far, and it’s hard to believe I am more than half way done with my internship here already. There is so much more that I want to accomplish!