Teacher on Two Wheels

Above:  S4S trip winners on their last day in Uganda

Above:  Students watch as villagers come together to save and loan money at a weekly savings group meeting

**This is a piece I just wrote for work.  It’s about the student trip I chaperoned for two weeks in Uganda at the end of June, and it appears on Invisible Children’s blog.  The trip was incredible!  I’m still feeding off the inspiration these kids passed on to me.  Thank you for a spectacular trip, guys!**

Now I know what type of student collects 30,000 books.  I understand what sort of teenager is able to mobilize a community to donate $25,000 toward a cause.  The profile of such a student looks something like this:   mature beyond one’s age, impressively personable, intelligent, able to problem-solve with a certain type of hyperactive creativity, driven, and—this one is almost more important than the other traits combined—a belief in one’s potential to change the world.

When 20 students from the top fundraising schools in IC’s Schools for Schools (S4S) program arrived at our house in Gulu at the end of June, we sat everyone down for a chat.  After reminding everyone to wear bug spray at dusk, and once we had explained how the pit latrine can save you if the water’s out, we talked about something a bit more meaty—the point of the trip.

Zach, Jed, and I, this year’s trip chaperones, reminded the students that they were in Uganda to learn.  They weren’t here to change the poverty that envelops vast swaths of the country.  No, they focus on that enough with their S4S clubs back home.  This trip was about something different.  They, we explained, could best continue to serve their Ugandan peers by absorbing every smell, every conversation, and the warmth of every of handshake they experienced while in-country.  Becoming saturated with Uganda in this way would let students act as portals for their friends and families back home, lenses through which northern Uganda could be viewed.  Because the students would be ambassadors for Uganda, we set out to flood them with experiences, with conflicting thoughts and new emotions.  With the help of elephants, rafts, students, villagers, cramped market alleys, airy classrooms, waving children, and hundreds of miles of hut-dotted countryside rolling by our bus windows like a silent movie, we did just that.

Above:  A few of the many animals we spotted in Murchison National Park

Each night, as we debriefed about the day’s events, students opened up to one another about how the trip was affecting them.  When we had a BBQ at an old fort outside of Gulu, an event that drew small groups of kids asking for food, issues like inequality, hunger, and American consumerism hit close to home for many students.  Some students watched as kids scampered for discarded watermelon peels and food scraps when we left our lunch site.  We talked about how, in such situations, giving a child the food he asks for isn’t a healthy way to help him.  What does it mean to help someone?  If you satiate a child’s hunger for an hour with a piece of meat, and then you leave, what are the repercussions of that act?  What stereotypes are reinforced (and shattered) when you give someone something and ask for nothing in return?  Night after night, students talked about the way the trip was spinning fresh thoughts for them and putting their lives back home into context.

After we visited all of IC’s Schools for Schools partner schools to see new IC-built (and student-funded) structures like classrooms and latrines, after students shadowed a Ugandan student for a day, after they watched as women in a village savings group pulled small, crumpled bills from their bras to contribute to the weekly savings fund, after they sat in cool, dark huts with IC mentors and talked to parents about their child’s academic struggles, after they spotted giraffes—more than a dozen in one group—dotting the horizon like a stand of yellow trees, and after they ate dinner at a camp site spread out under a thick splattering of stars set in an impossibly black sky above, I was able to witness something incredible:   I listened as students described how their views of the world were changing.

On logs around the campfire, in a cramped bus during half-day drives, and around the dinner table the final night of the trip, I heard snippets of powerful conversation.  One student realized that she had no choice but to come back to Uganda to work and live—her heart was here.  Another couldn’t fathom how so many materially-poor people could be so rich in attitude and outlook on life.  Someone else said the way she viewed the act of giving had changed.  Many confessed to harboring wanderlust unknown to them before.  “I’m going to look at maps differently now,” said one student.  For some, for the students who had never left the US before (let alone seen people living in extreme poverty), the trip opened up a new realm of human existence to them.  Throughout the trip, they articulated the way in which this new realm demanded space in their minds.

Listening to the fast, energized conversation I heard students spill to one another on this trip was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced as an educator.  In 12 short days, I wallowed in hours of student conversation steeped in curiosity.  I listened as students mined their impressions and interactions, and then watched in awe as they struck gold:  arriving at the realization that both American and Ugandan students hope for and need the same things in life, that people are the same at their cores.

To those 20 of you who came out:  Thank you!  You taught me just as much as Uganda taught you.

Below:  (top to bottom)  Jed and I with students in Murchison, all of us on the bus during the game drive, Jed (under a self-imposed quarantine of some sort?!) with students on the last night of the trip