For my STEP signature project, I traveled to different regions of Tanzania for an engineering study abroad. The goal of the trip was to help provide a sustainable source of water to a community that reached out in need of help. We spent most days in community, talking to members and building relationships, while watching a well get drilled. The second part of the trip, we went to a couple national parks in Tanzania and went on a couple safaris.
This trip was truly eye opening. I am not too sure what I had expected going in, but I certainly learned a lot more about other cultures than I had expected to. Everyone’s lives are so very different, and everyone has a unique perspective on life, with separate cultural norms, traditions, and practices. Before going into this trip, I definitely felt as if I had “less” culture than the rest of the world, since my life is just my life and it felt as if it was mundane. Sometime along the way, I realized that my definition of culture was “everything that is not mine,” since the rest of the worlds culture seems much more visible and different than ours. That being said, we all have our own culture, or what makes us, us. Individuality is such an interesting concept, and it is fascinating to learn about everyone’s different stories, while getting the opportunity to share mine.
Not only did I feel as if my view of the world changed of this trip, but also my view of myself. Starting simple and not too deep, I learned how helpful it is to journal what happens in order to process thoughts. Each day, we were encouraged to write down our thoughts in journals (since there was a LOT to process). It allowed me to put my feelings into words, good or bad. Not only that, I will be able to look back into my journal from the trip and reflect on my thoughts and feelings in the future. Since getting back from Tanzania, I have been journaling in my own separate journal each day in an effort to process my thoughts and feelings better. This has allowed me to see myself in a better light, and process my day in a healthier manner.
During my time in Tanzania, I got the wonderful opportunity to make friends with students from University of Dodoma (UDom). Over the course of two weeks, these students and the relationships we had with them became my favorite part of the experience. There was a sense of mutual curiosity between the OSU students and the UDom students. We would have conversations for hours just asking about each others culture, and things that seemed “normal” to one of us was completely new for another. I got to learn so much about their stories and home lives, and they were just as curious, if not more, about us. My roommate and I still keep in touch with the UDom students, and we really miss getting to talk with them and hang out with them. By the end of the trip, all of the OSU students were good friends with the UDom students, and we had formed a little community of shared interest, knowledge, goals, and love.
While in Tanzania, most of the time was spent in a small community called Marwa. The name of the project is Maji Marwa, which directly translates from Swahili, “Water Marwa.” Some of the interactions that we had in Marwa were truly unique, and experiences that felt like once in a life time interactions. We would interview community members on their general thoughts about water. However, in order to do this, most of the time we would have to ask the UDom students in english, which they would then ask in Swahili, and translate their answers back to english. Though we did know some Swahili, our knowledge was very limited. The women and children often walk for 5-7 hours each day to go get water for the family. As we were drilling the well, it was very emotional to see the community members of Marwa watch as water was exploding out of the earth. The children in community would hold hands with us and ask questions like why hair was long, and even the little things were so emotion packed and really made me think about culture in general, the whole time I was there, and even longer once I returned.
These experiences that I got the opportunity to have feel so important to me. I got to experience another part of the world, and have an impact on making someone else’s quality of life just a little better. Traveling to Tanzania made me very glad that I am part of the humanitarian engineering minor. While there is so much more to learn, I feel so very grateful that I got the opportunity to apply myself in this manner. This trip solidified my want to make a difference in the world, and do my best to make things more accessible, affordable, and hopefully help improve people’s overall quality of life.
