Camerons Reflections

“Tupendane”… I asked multiple kids in the center if they had heard this word before and they all simply gave me a bashful yet genuine smile. Eventually, one enlightened me with the fact that it meant “Love each other”. I knew it had something to do with love but I was filled with an overwhelming sense of joy and belonging when I really knew the meaning. I truly do not know what it is about this group of people that pulled me in and held my heart so tight, and I am not sure I will ever know. A few of the older kids and the mamas knew some English and most of the younger kids knew close to none. How do you make a connection when you cannot fully speak your mind or even ask simple questions a lot of the time? I caught myself pondering this thought a couple of times throughout my visit and on the plane ride home. I found that communication and expression are so much more than what we can convey through our words. A lasting moment of comforting eye contact or holding hands can be miraculously impressionable forms of love. I fully realized this the day I left for home.

The first week was an incredibly lonely time for me. Being the only primarily English speaker and trying to walk into a culture with a group of people who have lived their entire lives different from you is far from comfortable. I knew I had to push through this feeling because I could see that there were amazing things waiting beyond the fear. And there were. I grew to love helping the mamas feed the chickens and grate carrots in the kitchen and help the younger kids hang their clothes. My favorite part of everyday was helping the older kids with homework at night. I was able to give a lot of help in biology, chemistry and math. Occasionally geography, but that usually ended in both of us laughing because I could not figure out a way to explain “the importance of volcanoes” or some other geological phenomenon in a way that made sense. Even writing this now, I have a smile on my face because I can remember so vividly how much happiness it brought me when I would reveal the unfortunate news that I had no idea what the “the five causes of earthquakes” were and the kids would say “I know you know” or “you just write”. My only reaction was to laugh… then the kids would laugh and the happiness was contagious. They also spent some of this time trying to teach me Swahili. I learned quite a bit this way. A night in my first week, one of the kids put a book in Swahili in front of me and told me to read it. I spent about fifteen minutes reading a long passage, not understanding a word of it. Occasionally I would hear a chuckle from another table letting me know that I had an audience of more than who sat right in front of me. No matter how helpless I seemed, the kids were always so excited to teach me a new word or phrase. Knowledge was passed from myself to the kids and from the kids to myself.

Living here for six weeks allowed me to make lasting impressions on some of these kids, and vice versa, that I did not even realize were forming until it was time to leave it all behind. We sat in the dining hall as I listened to one of the older boys give a speech for my going away. One of the younger girls reached her hands out and looked at me with eyes full of sadness. My heart broke in that moment. However, this was not the hardest feeling of the day. One boy had been asking frequently throughout my last week how much time remained for me in Tanzania and every time I told him: a week, four days, two days, then only one. He said it was a “shida” (“problem”) because it was not enough time. I always agreed. On my final day, after I had packed my bags in the car and reached the end of my stay, he walked up to me one more time and asked if it was time for me to leave. I said, “soon, maybe five minutes”. Then one of us reached out our hand and we just stood there and held hands for a few moments. No one said another word, there was nothing else to be said. I stared at his hands and the beauty of these people raced through my thoughts. The way they live, the way they work hard, the way they love each other. I could see now that it was inevitable that I fell in love with the culture and the people who live in it. We walked together in silence toward the dining hall and one of the mamas embraced me in a hug. I finally I broke out in tears because it really hit me that I was not going to see these people for a very long time. I fell in love with every last one of them and after that, there was not a doubt in my mind that this was not “goodbye” but a “see you later”.