Rahim: African Health and Community Project in Kenya

This summer I spent 8 weeks volunteering for the African Health and Community Project (AHCP) in Nairobi Kenya. I was matched with the African Health and Community Project through AIESEC Yale, which contacted AIESEC Nairobi and found the opportunity for me to work with them. AHCP is an organization located in the Kibera slum of Nairobi. I was able to go on this trip because I was awarded an International Study Award, which provided me with the funds I needed to have this opportunity to travel and experience Kenya.

My project involved me first meeting with headmasters of neighboring primary schools in Nairobi and creating a network that allowed AHCP and these schools to be in constant communication. AHCP was looking at establishing a health education program in schools that currently did not provide health education to its students, and so I worked on a lesson plan for AHCP to be able to teach. We were able to form a network of 4 schools that were very underfunded and without basic resources such as running water and food, and worked out a schedule that included two health classes per week per grade level. The health classes incorporated education on HIV transmission and risk factors, proper procedures for keeping water uncontaminated, and ways in which to ensure good hygiene. I was able to go through every grade level in all 4 schools and complete the lesson plan, and once I finished teaching the class, I worked with the principles of the schools in establishing health education the basic core curriculum.

The second part of my project involved me working with other organizations including the Ruben Center on getting funding for the schools and local clinics that were desperately in need of basic resources that were clearly lacking. I did not have enough time to complete this objective by the time I had to leave, so I have been working on this since I have been back. I wish to go back to Nairobi at some point next summer and continue to work with AHCP to provide more funding and resources for the schools and clinics that I had worked with.

Rahim is a junior in Branford College.

Caroline: Reflecting on Sao Paulo

This past summer, I spent eight weeks in São Paulo, Brazil teaching English to elementary school children. I lived and immersed myself in a country I had never been to, had no knowledge of the official language, and only knew simple facts about through books. This internship was introduced to me by AIESEC, an international organization that matches interns up with opportunities abroad. 

Throughout my time in São Paulo, I lived with a host family—a 22-year-old Brazilian college student named Thais and her mother. During my stay, they introduced me to their extended family as well, and it was wonderful to be a part of a typical Brazilian household. Every Saturday, we went over to Thais’ grandparents’ home for dinner and ate the Brazilian national dish, called feijoada. Now one of my favorite dishes! In addition to feijoada, I was able to try so many other authentic Brazilian foods and exotic fruits. Eating is one of my favorite activities and is one of the best ways, I believe, people can immerse themselves into a culture.

Feijoada- yum yum!

For my internship, I worked at an elementary school called Colégio Mirassol. The faculty members were welcoming and the students were extremely friendly and enthusiastic. I worked with two English professors who taught various English levels to 2^nd through 9^th graders. Everyday, I went to class with them to lead grammar lectures, have conversations, and share my knowledge about American culture with them. However, despite the fact that I was their teacher, I ended up learning as much from them as they did with me. During recess and snack time, some of the students from the 6^th grade class were my teacher as well. Two girls in particular, Camille and Victoria taught me basic Portuguese, while we were having a conversation in English. Just as I had hoped to be a great influence and share my culture and language with these girls and their fellow classmates, these children made a big impact on me. They taught me not only their culture and language, but also their value for having a community and family.

Although my first day at work went well, transportation to and from there was not so easy. My schedule consisted of getting to and leaving work during rush hour, and at these times, being in the subway felt like being packed in a can of sardines. It was crowded and busy and quite frankly, really nerve-racking for a foreigner with so little knowledge of the country she was in. Nonetheless, despite difficulties such as these, I was able to adapt to the daily routines that simply helped give me the full experience of living in São Paulo. I was actually able to experience what it was like to live as a local.

My internship was a wonderful life experience. It was my first extended stay abroad, and further, my first time by myself abroad. 

Caroline is a Senior in Jonathan Edwards College.

My Experience in Brazil

Since I did focus my first post on how language shaped my experience in Brazil, I would like to take some time to discuss the AIESEC experience as a whole! Going abroad through an AIESEC internship was one of the best decisions I could have made this summer – the structure and connections that the organization facilitated for my experience were absolutely amazing.

One of the best parts of the experience was definitely getting the chance to live with a host family – and I really lucked out with my family! When I first learned of the distance between the home that I was going to live in and the location of my job, I was actually pretty disappointed. I was going to have to spend at least 2-3 hours per day commuting from home to work. Apparently, the Brazilian family in the city that had originally offered to host encountered some last minute, unavoidable circumstances that prevented them from taking in an intern.

So, what ended up happening was that a member of the LC – my host sister, Luana – offered to take me in just a couple days before my arrival. After spending just a few days with the family, the commute became totally irrelevant. Luana was so great and so helpful in guiding me through my experience, and my host mother and father and their friends and family from all around the neighborhood were hilarious, witty, so genuinely interested in speaking and sharing with me – and, amazing cooks! I worked in the evening nearly every day, so I would come home after my host family had finished dinner – which just meant the fridge was completely stocked with delicious Brazilian meat, beans, rice, and more.

With my host family

Before I went, I was really excited to travel to Brazil alone, coming into the country without knowing anyone. And going through AIESEC, I did get that sense of independence, while also having a huge safety net and so many opportunities to meet people once in Brazil.

I met many members of the LC in Belo Horizonte very quickly since my host sister was a member of the committee, and I also started meeting new interns from all over the world – people who were able to teach me and show me things about their lives in their own countries that I’d known nothing about before. I met a girl my age from Morocco, who attends school in the UK – and speaks French, Arabic, English, and Spanish fluently!

As I learned about other people from various countries, I was also able to share a lot about my own culture, both of the United States and Russia, and dispel a surprising amount of stereotypes that I hadn’t even known existed so strongly. Many people I met had a perception of the United States as a country with a very homogeneous culture, and they were interested in hearing about the cultural variety I’ve experienced in my life, especially being a first-generation American. I was able to explain to people that the United States is a country with a countless amount of cultural subsets and communities. I found myself having a hard time answering questions about what our country is like, and more often than not, I found myself explaining that America is defined, in many ways, by the fact that there IS no easy way to explain “what it’s like.”

I encountered a lot of interesting cultural differences that I had to deal with in Brazil. For example, like in many countries, Brazilians greet each other with a hug and a kiss, even in the most formal of situations. With me, however, I noticed that a lot of people who knew that I was from the United States either hesitated significantly before hugging me, or went directly for a handshake! This was pretty disappointing, because I really enjoyed greeting people in the way that they do in Brazil, and I knew I’d get to experience plenty of handshakes once I came back home! I talked to people that I was closer with about this, and we shared a lot about the random nature of these cultural differences – people were glad to hear that generally, Americans wouldn’t think that greeting with hugs is a rude practice – we have just adopted a different pattern of greeting!

I feel like the most important lesson that I learned in Brazil was that sharing myself and my experiences is a much more valuable use of my time than I had ever imagined before. When I first started working at the language school, I was worried that I wasn’t helping the students as much as I could – after all, I was merely spending my time speaking my own native tongue. It wasn’t a particularly difficult or tiring task to engage in. But one day, a teacher at the school told me that one of his students, who had had the intention of repeating her most recent semester, had come up to him and revealed that she had decided to move forward instead. She had said that ever since I’d started attending their classes, she’d gained a lot of confidence in her knowledge and had realized that she knew much more English than she had thought. I felt so great and so honored when I heard this. Although this was the only student who made the big decision to move forward in her studies instead of repeating a semester, a lot of the students did also become much more aware about how much English they actually do know. That’s what made realize that I didn’t have to be stressed or challenged in the way that I had thought for my work to be valuable – that’s when I realized that simply being there at the school and doing the best I could was influencing other people in the exact same way that everyone I met in Brazil influenced my life – just by being themselves and sharing with me!

 

In general, I really loved the culture and the people of Brazil so much. I was amazed at how many open, friendly, and truly engaging interactions I was able to have throughout my time there with complete strangers. During my first few bus rides, I was quite shy about asking others for help with directions in my broken Portuguese, but I soon realized that my shyness was completely unnecessary. Not only would strangers help me as much as they could, but they would ask me questions about where I was from and what I was doing in the city, how I liked Brazil so far, and even if I liked Brazilian food! It wasn’t just with me that people were so open – I saw other strangers speaking to each other in Portuguese on the buses all the time, and I often tried to guess if people who were engaged in conversation really knew each other or if they had simply met on the way to work and began chatting!

I concluded my time in Brazil by travelling to Rio de Janeiro, then a small town called Parati, and finally to São Paulo, with several other interns that had come to Brazil through AIESEC. To do justice to these experiences would take much more detail, so I won’t attempt to really explore the trip here – but I will say that the experiences I had travelling were completely life-changing for me. I had never stayed in hostels before, and had no idea how much I would enjoy it. Being able to instantly meet all kinds of new people from literally all over the world, staying up late and hearing all about their amazing stories, while filling our busy days to the brim with sight-seeing and exploring was just simply incredible. I was so inspired by the variety of things I was exposed to within the timespan of a single week, ranging from the beautiful mountains and beaches in the south of Brazil, to the massive urban monster of São Paulo, to the amazing, unique people that we stumbled across. I met a woman from Germany who was living in Argentina because she studied abroad there in high school and became fluent in Spanish (with no prior experience) and had fallen in love with the country. The reason I met her was because my friends and I were intrigued when we saw her tending to an enormous burn wound all over the sole of her foot – we learned that just a few days ago, she had spontaneously decided to participate in the tradition of running across hot coals during a festival in Argentina!

In Rio with other AIESEC interns

Coming home after spending two incredible months in Brazil was a shock at first – on the plane, I just couldn’t believe I was going back to my regular life. But ultimately, the experience I had was so wonderful, and definitely the most rewarding thing I think I’ve done to date! Now, I just can’t wait to travel abroad and seek out experiences like this again in my life.

Learning Portuguese in Brazil!

For me, the mere thought of condensing two whole months of my experiences in Brazil this summer into just a few pages of writing was extremely daunting! So, I first decided that in this post, I’m going to focus on telling you guys about the significance and importance that language had during my two months abroad.

Thinking back to my mindset before the trip, I really can’t pinpoint what my expectations or anxieties or hopes were, and I think that’s largely because I didn’t have that many expectations about the trip. I was excited, but I just didn’t want to plan. The thing is, I realize now that I didn’t expect that whatever I experienced in Brazil would overwhelmingly surprise me - and I was wrong!

I’m actually really surprised by the extent of the passion that I developed for the Portuguese language while I was in Brazil, and by the extent to which I’ve also been inspired to perfect and develop my Spanish after becoming close friends with a lot of EPs from Spanish-speaking countries. I didn’t think that my experience would center so much around the foreign language aspect of the trip. At the language school that I worked at, called “CCAA,” I was the only native English speaker that many of the students had ever gotten the chance to speak with in their lives, and my internship was an opportunity for these students to finally practice their English in a “real” context. I worked with students of all ages, and many of them – both younger and older – were actually scared of me at the start! To them, speaking with me in front of their regular teachers was like a final exam. I did my best to calm their concerns, often offering them up some of my own broken Portuguese as an amusing comparison.

At the language school with students and teachers

Quite suddenly though, my Portuguese started getting a lot better as I spent more time at CCAA, becoming friends with the teachers and administrators and learning more of the language from them, as well as from my host family, and some daunting solo trips on the bus system at night (think: no names for the bus stops, and nothing but my lacking vocabulary, a map of the city, and the friendliness of the other passengers to guide me to my destination).

At first, when the teachers at the language school proudly told me that they were intent on teaching me the pronunciation native to their region, I was worried that my Portuguese accent would be too limited and that I wouldn’t be able to adapt to a more “standard” Brazilian Portuguese if I wanted to. The teachers told me they would make me a true “mineiro” Brazilian (the city Belo Horizonte is in the state Minas Gerais), and I didn’t believe them! But they were right; now, I defend the strong “mineiro,” sing-songy accent as passionately as they did! One of my best friends is from Recife, Brazil – a city much further north than where I lived – and his Portuguese accent just doesn’t sound right to me!

Before I knew it, I went from being completely lost in Portuguese, to being able to interact with people on the street, on the buses, cashiers, and the students at the language school. When I first started at the school, I couldn’t follow the conversations between the students in Portuguese, but by the end of my internship, I was often pretending with the younger kids that I knew significantly less Portuguese than I really did so that they wouldn’t stop trying to communicate with me in English.

Learning to speak and understand at such a rapid rate was jarring sometimes because it took some time to trust that my pronunciation was being understood. To me, what I was saying sounded like gibberish at times, and it was incredible when my thoughts and ideas were actually understood, despite my strong accent. I couldn’t interact with my host parents on my first day at all, and by the end of my stay, we could share stories and discuss things and laugh at jokes together in Portuguese.

The extreme difficulty of the language gap that existed for me at the beginning of my time in Brazil only made bridging that gap all the more rewarding. Sure, in the first few days, I used Google Translate to speak accurately and freely with my host parents when I really needed to, but attempting to communicate on my own, through limited and basic Portuguese, was infinitely more satisfying. I felt so honored that they would speak Portuguese with me at a normal speaking rate, trust that I would understand them, and always granted me all their focus to understand me.

Being immersed in the Portuguese environment and experiencing my entire time in Brazil through this filter really motivated me to improve upon the languages that I already know, too. I met so many interns from Spanish speaking countries, and at first, I was extremely shy about speaking Spanish with them. But everyone was so supportive of my attempts, and very invested in helping me improve my Spanish while I helped them improve their English. Sometimes, after some Brazilian caipirinhas (a liquor called cachaça mixed with limes and sugar), my accent would radically improve and my new friends and I would joke about how I could suddenly understand even the heaviest Colombian accents amongst the other interns. Funny as it may seem, even (or especially) those silly experiences really encouraged me about the potential I have to become fluent in Spanish someday!

With other AIESEC interns!

Experiencing the personal connections and channels of communication that are opened by language has encouraged me to improve my Russian as well. Both of my parents immigrated to the United States before I was born, and although I can speak Russian pretty freely with my family, I cannot read or write or articulate my thoughts nearly as well as in English. Learning Portuguese really made me realize how much I could be wasting if I never bring my Russian to the same level as my English – I have all the tools and foundation to do it! And so, I decided I would plan to take heritage Russian classes at Yale now.

Ultimately, we’ll always have dictionaries and translators, and with the technological advances of the present day, bridging language gaps is becoming easier and easier without actually learning new languages – and opening these swift channels of communication around the world is great. But being in Brazil, I really came to understand that there’s still no substitute for being able to speak to another human being directly with your own words, face to face; struggling with language this summer was an extremely pivotal experience for me!