Africa Post 1: Still in Iowa

When people find out that I am headed to Africa this summer they tell me, “Hannah, write a blog so you can tell us what you are doing” and in my head I’m like, “I have no idea what I’m doing,” but that’s not what people want to hear when you pack up and leave the country for two months. Actually, I don’t think people ever like hearing that. So here’s the spiel:

I will depart June 7^th from the Des Moines airport where I will meet up with two professors and other students travelling to the Uganda. I plan to take everything I could ever need for seven weeks in a carry-on and a backpack. This will allow me to use my checked luggage for supplies we are bringing for the students and projects in Uganda. By packing lightly and avoiding checked luggage I am also hoping I eliminate the fear of being stranded in Africa without my luggage, a.k.a. sunscreen. We will take a short flight to Minneapolis and from there I am in for my first international flight as we fly to the Netherlands.

After a seven-hour flight we will land in Amsterdam and will meet up with other students from our team who have been travelling. We will then continue on our final eight-hour flight to Kigali, Uganda. When we arrive we will be reunited with our entire team including those already stationed in Uganda as well as be introduced to our bi-national team members from Makerere University. Somewhere amidst all of this we will sleep and eat, but most importantly we will travel to Queen Victoria National Park where elephants run around. I’m really excited about that.

With all of this excitement and adrenaline whirling, we will hit the ground running with our projects and the reason we are truly travelling across the world for the summer.  The goal: help establish school gardens as out door learning labs that produce supplements for school lunches and help the school children transfer their knowledge and skills to their home gardens and families.

This program has been run through Iowa State University’s Center for Sustainable Rural Livelihoods since 2006. Students from Makerere University and Iowa State University work in bi-national teams to teach, garden, and set and accomplish goals in various projects. These projects include health and sanitation, nutrition, beekeeping, irrigation, grain storage, poultry, and agroforestry. These projects take place at two locations, Nakynoni and Namasagali primary schools. This year I will be travelling with a team of seven other ISU service learners, four interns, and five staff. My projects will focus on nutrition, health and sanitation. Details and reports on what has been done on these projects previously can be found at http://www.srl.ag.iastate.edu/.

I am hoping to continue the success of the nutrition advancements that have been made at Namasagali and introduce these practices at Nakynoni. I want to become very involved in the health and sanitation project that is in place to provide reusable sanitary pads for young girls and educate all students about the importance of hygiene. Details and goals will be ironed out when I formally meet my colleagues in Uganda and then the real fun begins. The projects introduced by us as collegiate students are designed to provide a hands-on learning experience for primary students to learn about agriculture. By sharing our love of agriculture we hope to inspire young children to stay in school longer and pursue an education that can better themselves, their families, and their communities.

On a more personal level, in the process of teaching these students, I have a feeling that I will take more from this experience than anything I am able to give. I have always dreamed of going to Africa. I can’t explain why or when this desire revealed itself, but I have always felt this connection to a land I’ve never been to. Finding a program that wanted my skills in a country my heart has been homesick for is literally a dream come true.

I have to laugh when I say “skills”, though. It wasn’t until I arrived at Iowa State University that I even developed a mild interest in agriculture. I enrolled as a journalism and mass communications major with the intention of picking up a second major in international studies. The truth is though; I never wanted to be a journalist. I’ve never actually aspired to be a journalist, firefighter, teacher, farmer, or even a doctor. All I’ve ever known is I want to help people, I just don't have the how part figured out quite yet.

So after talking to a few friends in different fields, I heard about the Global Resource Systems program through the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and thought it sounded like the coolest thing ever. I moved into the major and discovered that it really is. I had the chance to do some undergraduate research through the honors program and learned so much with Dr. Robert Mazur concerning the implementation of farmer field schools and rural sociology. I also enrolled in a course with Dr. Gail Nonnecke who founded the global resource systems major at Iowa State and plays a vital role in the service-learning program. (& To be honest, pretty much everything else, I don’t know how she does it.) Through coursework and independent preparation I have developed a keen interest in food security and agriculture in the developing world, as I truly believe it to be a key factor of eliminating poverty.

As it approaches two in the morning I realize I am rambling and when people asked me to blog they probably wanted to hear about my encounters with ten-foot long crocodiles at the Nile River, not my poorly written theories of development I think about when I can’t fall asleep on my couch in the middle of Iowa. But I guess this is what I’ve done most of my summer so far, so maybe it’s important to share. As time goes by I hope I get the hang of this whole blog thing and I can share things that I learned, was shocked by, or just thought were really cool. But for now, it's pretty rainy in Iowa and it's 80 degrees in Kampala. 12 days and counting.