Explore, learn and turn awareness into action. This is the challenge-are you up to the task?
Students for Education, Empowerment and Development is accepting applications for their upcoming six-week summer internship in Zambia and Kenya. SEED is a student-based organization that strives for greater communication between cultures, the creation of equitable partnerships, and the realization of human potential. The organization’s scholarship fund facilitates access to primary school for orphans and vulnerable children in parts of Africa, while mobilizing Canadian students to engage in human development projects locally and overseas.
Interns will be working in the Ng’omba compound, on the outskirts of Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia. It is a community of 23,000 of the country’s poorest residents, approximately 1,000 of whom are orphans.
Like any individual, every community has its strengths and weaknesses. Ng’omba compound’s faults are many, and easy to see: crumbling brick homes, uneven dirt roads, limited access to clean water or electricity, and garbage in every corner. Dig a little deeper and you will discover even greater weaknesses, not in the community’s infrastructure but its social fabric. Unemployment is rampant, a substantial percentage of the men (and inevitably their families) suffer from alcoholism, access to primary school is by no means guaranteed, and gender equality is largely unheard of.
It is a reality so distant from our own. An outsider observer could easily deem it hopeless and forget to ask: what are the community’s strengths, and its potential?
The community’s greatest strength is its people. And yet, their talents, insights and activism are consistently ignored by governments and the foreign media. As Stephen Lewis accurately writes, “The Western world fails to understand the range of knowledge, sophistication, solidarity, generosity and sheer, unbridled resilience at the grassroots of the continent, particularly the women. We underestimate Africa; we always underestimate Africa.”
We were a group of 11 Canadian university students and two recent graduates that traveled to Zambia in the summer of 2005. During a community workshop, a Zambian woman expressed her belief that being infected with HIV was better then living an impoverished existence, since with the disease there is at least an end in sight. Her stark statement transcended any differences between the people of Zambia and the Canadian visitors. For the first time, many of us actually felt the inescapable dread of poverty, despite not being poor ourselves.
However, it was not feelings of dread and despair that motivated us to get involved with SEED-it was witnessing the resolve and perseverance of individual Africans. There was the grandmother that has buried several of her own children and grows vegetables to feed her grandchildren; the young woman who lost her mother, left her abusive father and is working to save money to enroll in grade nine; the school teacher who is underpaid and still tutors his students after school, free of charge; the HIV-infected gentleman who organizes support groups and access to medication for other patients. Their struggle became our struggle, and our organization, SEED, grew from this sense of common purpose.
We are aware of the multifaceted complexity of global poverty, and it is not our intention to oversimplify the challenge. However, SEED has made a conscious decision to focus on education, working in partnership with local organizations to increase access to education in Sub-Saharan Africa.
When a child in impoverished communities like Ng’omba is given the opportunity to attend school (thanks to a SEED scholarship), the young student is provided with daily meals and some basic health care along with an education and much greater sense of belonging. The correlation between education and improving a child’s quality of life cannot be overstated. SEED believes the acquisition of education is one of the most liberating human experiences, since education is a tool used to break free from subsidence living, to realize one’s individual potential, and to contribute to the greater good.
If you share this belief and want to be part of our movement, apply for the summer internship. Our commitment to the people of Ng’omba and communities like it is not blind faith, but a learned realization, one that we would like to extend to you by sharing our experience with you. By working, researching, playing, and living with the people, building relationships and, most importantly, listening to their stories, you too will be engaging in their struggle and making it your own.
Internships will involve the development and implementation of a group project at a community school, field research, facilitating and attending local workshops, teaching classes, and writing about new and current students’ experience in the SEED scholarship program. But more than the tasks at hand, it is the random encounters with locals, the candid exchanges of hardships, ideas, and dreams, and the unexpected personal realizations that really facilitate learning and make each internship experience unique.
SEED internships are being offered to Canadian university students and will commence in May & August, 2007. Interns are responsible for their own transportation and living costs. If you are interested, please email [email protected] and an application will be emailed. The deadline to submit applications is March 31, 2007.
