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!

Reflections on @ Summer!

Wow, that went by fast!  This has been by far the best summer of my life.  The other interns were amazing and really fun to work with.  The camp was incredible.  And these past two weeks in Budapest and Central Europe were the highlight of my summer.

The last two weeks in the camp were even better than the first two.  We spent one night at one of the interns house in Kecskemet.  After an endless supply of giant, homemade "bagel bites", she took us to a hill with a great view of the city.  We were then treated to an incredible piano performance by her older sister back at the house. 

The activities put on by the camp the last week were even more exciting.  For the last night we had a talent show where we were treated to a Michael Jackson dance, a Hungarian folk song by some of the interns, and a rendition of Grease Lightning by the camp workers.  Afterwards there was a showcasing of the movies made by the filmmaking team, followed by a dance for the students, with a live DJ. 

I really enjoyed my time spent at the camp for those four weeks.  I originally thought the internship took place in Budapest, so I was surprised to learn that it actually took place in a small village a couple hours from the capital.  After the first week however, I realized that this was for the better.  The camp was its own world, where we were able to get really close to the other interns, and to the Hungarian workers (squirrels as they were called by the students).  The camp was really supportive of us and gave us around $30 each week for snacks or whatever we wanted.

The last two weeks in Budapest were a phenomenal reward for our time at the camp.  We got free housing in a hostel in Budapest, and with the public transportation system we were never far from anywhere.  One of the first days the AIESEC team took us on a grand tour of Budapest.  We saw the castle, did a boat tour of the Danube, and went to some world famous clubs around the city.  After that day, we figured out for ourselves what we wanted to do.

We spent a couple more days in Budapest, before the majority of us left for Prague.  We spent two days  there, which was just enough time.  We got to see all the major landmarks, and ate at some traditional Bohemian restaurants.  Afterwards some of the group went to Bratislava, while two of us left for Munich, which was my favorite city of the trip.  After seeing the world famous beer gardens and tasting some world class beer, we took a detour to Neuschwanstein castle.  This castle built during the romantic era was the inspiration for the Beauty and the Beast castle in Disneyland. 

After returning from Munich we spent a day at the Sziget festival in Budapest, which was voted as Europe's best major music festival.  There was a ferris wheel and a whole bunch of other activities to do during the day.  Then at night we got to see Steve Aoki live.

The following day we all went to Vienna, which was a beautiful city.  Despite its beauty, it was a little too quiet for my liking, and one day there was good enough.  We spent our last days in Budapest souvenir shopping and seeing any monuments we missed.

All in all I had the time of my life on this trip.  I had a great time at the summer camp, interacting with the kids and bonding with the AIESEC interns.  Then I got to see all the major cities in major Europe all while having a home base in Budapest.

-Zach

The People Team

The following post includes two entries- one written after the teaching stint of my internship had ended, and one upon returning home after the additional two weeks of travel in Europe.

7.27.12

Our camp was a renovated military bunker

It’s the last day of teaching. And with that, these four weeks in Kecskemet have come to an end. There is an odd lack of closure, but then again, few things rarely come with the closure I expect. The ending of freshman year of college, for example came with an odd lack of finality. Perhaps it was the awkwardly staggered trickling of exam endings, and the absence of a final bell, a la high school, that would symbolically herald the arrival of summer.

Fire shows at the camp

Regardless, we are done! I say not free, mostly because I didn’t feel constrained in Kecskemet, despite the fact that teaching started at 8:30 each morning, five days a week. There are no further lesson plans to be made, and instead, our efforts focus on planning our vacation time in Budapest (and ideally Vienna and Prague!). Fridays, while usually reserved for a weekend trip to the city center, and usually savored as an opportunity for a change of scenery from the camp, have donned a new outfit today. Instead, we stay at the camp, passing what we know to be our last afternoon and night. Actually, then I retract my prior rumination. Although it hasn’t quite hit me that these are our final hours here (forgive the dramatic connotations of that phrase), we’ve each made our little goodbyes. Kim and I played tennis one last time, which seemed a little more special as there was a wonderfully refreshing sun shower that accompanied our game. The Andys (our mentors) gave us little embroidered and tie-dyed bags, as well as diplomas, as a souvenir of our time here. There is a talent show tonight where we will sing our goodbyes to the camp via Hungarian folk song (that will hopefully be performed with at least minimal degrees of proficiency).

Exploring Kecskemet's town square

The Hungarian band Animal Cannibals performed at the camp.

I’m trying to look back and aptly summarize my experience, but I can’t find a thesis-like umbrella to categorize my thoughts under. We ate a lot of bread. And ice cream. Took daily naps, sometimes at least two or three in an afternoon. We swatted flies. And tennis balls. And badminton shuttlecocks. And ping pong balls. We (the Americans at least) enforced the obnoxious tourist stereotype. We adapted to the fizziness of the water. Adopted an air of professionalism as we taught (I failed miserably. I’m not intimidating, and I can’t be stern. Even my kids asked me, “Why are you so happy all the time?”). Bounced on trampolines. Counted the stars. Patted ourselves on the back when we could respond with simple phrases like “Koszonom.” Sang. Climbed a hill. Drank from buckets. Attempted to smuggle food out of the hangar. Tickled and poked each other mercilessly. Mastered the copy machine. Lesson planned. Improvised shamelessly as lesson plans proved ineffective, or if we blatantly left them unmade. Befriended little Ukranian boys. Taught American slang. Facetiously(?) argued for the superiority of our respective hometowns and countries.

Nostalgia is now settling in, and it’s not even over yet. 

Until Budapest,

Kelly 

8.15.12

At Sziget, the largest music festival in Central Europe

I’m sitting at a coffee shop in Miami again, my two-month stint in Europe now just a memory. Tangibly, I’ve come away with a few things, including: a handful of paprika spoons to give away as souvenirs and a ridiculous amount of photos that pretty much categorizes me as an obnoxious Asian tourist.

I’m actually flipping through the photos as I write this post and I know already that what I will miss most will be the people. Budapest was amazing to explore, Prague was a very fun blur, and Vienna was absolutely breathtaking in terms of its architecture. But this past internship was so valuable, not because of the sights that I was able to see, but because it taught me so much about other cultures and opened me up to so many new experiences. I not only was introduced to the Hungarian culture, but also to the cultures and values of the other AIESEC trainees that I worked with. Ireland, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Australia, and China are now also less elusive to me, and it was fascinating to compare and contrast our respective pop cultures, educational systems, and slang. I gained insight into Hungary not only by exploring my surroundings, but also through the stories that my students would share. They loved to ask me questions about America and I was equally intrigued by their own lives. They introduced me to the sport of handball, and I played them American rap in return. I learned some Hungarian as well—they thought it would be funny to teach me Hungarian curse words as well as pick up lines.

A view of Budapest from Gellert Hill at night

In terms of other things that I’ll miss, I’m already craving a gyro from one of the seemingly infinite stands that mark virtually every street corner in Budapest. Forty-cent gelato scoops. Paddle boating in Lake Balaton. Getting lost in a strange new city, without the correct currency or knowledge of the local language. Pedro eating mushroom soup with bananas. Katie mocking my American accent. Dinner at Zsuzsi’s house. Bonfires in the forest. Climbing hills. Etc. etc.

Thank you to all those at AIESEC that made this possible. It’s been an absolutely amazing summer.

Best,

Kelly

Hungarian Reflections

It’s been a week since I left Budapest, and I’ve been missing it constantly. I don’t just miss the other trainees, who I still talk to occasionally; I also miss working in the camp. Having a regular schedule gave structure to my day and made me feel like I was actually accomplishing something. Also, I miss my kids.

Summer for Youth is a camp that aims to teach high school-aged kids about other cultures and about English through immersion. Because we had kids of all ages—our youngest was 11, at one point, and our oldest was 20—we had to keep changing what we were doing in order to keep them interested. We did presentations on our home countries, on the problems in our countries, on our cultures, on our native languages, and more. We went to Zumba and Margarit Island once a week each. We played games like Japanese football, Red Rover, Manhunt, Kabadi, etc. We taught them the different AIESEC roll calls and had a “wish box” where the delegates at the camp could ask us to do any crazy thing they wanted us to do (within reason). We had team-building exercises and scavenger hunts.

What we really struggled with was the changing roster of the camps. Some people stayed for one week, while others stayed for two weeks—not always consecutively. This meant that we were never sure who had seen that presentation already, or done that activity in a previous camp. This also meant that, at least with the kids who came back for a second week, we were able to establish bonds of friendship beyond those of just teacher and delegate.

Just to talk about a few:

Brigitta was Hannah’s host. We went to Síofok and the baths with her. I actually tutored her in algebra for a little while.

Zsambo and Csenge, brother and sister, were the Justin Bieber and the baby princess of the camp, respectively. Both of them were in my homegroup because, as the youngest trainee, I was in charge of the youngest delegates. (I couldn’t be put in charge of delegates who were older than me.) Zsambo’s English was very good, but Csenge’s English was very poor. At ages 13 and 11, they were the youngest delegates at the camp, and also arguably the most energetic.

Tami is an enthusiastic English student, and was always active in every activity, asked questions during presentations, and was generally interested in the camp. He still Facebook messages me occasionally, asking me how I’m doing and sometimes asking for help with English homework.

We had two Réka’s (Réka means river in Hungarian), both of whom we grew very close to. One of them had an American parent, and won a trip to China. The other one turned fourteen while all of us were still in Budapest, so we took her out for chocolate fondue and dinner on her birthday. She later told us that it was the best birthday she’d ever had.

I really, really miss these kids. A good number of them—the most active ones, and the ones I talked to the most—have added me on Facebook, and we’re on good enough terms that we feel comfortable chatting with each other and commenting/liking posts and pictures. I love knowing that I have tens of people willing to host me if I ever go back to Budapest (which I definitely plan to do). It really makes Budapest feel like home.

When I was shopping for souvenirs for my friends and family at home in the last few days I was in Budapest, I realized that I didn’t know what to buy. Usually, there are a few specific items you should get from a place that represents it very well—bits of the Berlin Wall from Berlin, crystal from Prague—but I didn’t know what to get from Budapest. I simply didn’t feel like a tourist there, and I didn’t know what would encompass my entire experience there.

Someday I’ll be back. Hopefully “someday” doesn’t lie too far in the future, because the idea of those kids forgetting about me is heartbreaking. But for now, I’ll continue messaging them and seeing how their lives are going. Summer for Youth didn’t just teach Hungarian kids about other cultures from around the world; it forged friendships across borders.