Teacher Reflections

In July 2008, three U.S. teachers spent much of a week in Kambi ya Simba. Susan Secord teaches fourth grade in Boulder, Colorado. Laura Rog is the service-learning coordinator in Albion, New York. And Brent Talbot is a graduate student in ethnomusicology.

By day, the three shared books their own students had created about life in their own village in the U.S.. They distributed school supplies with funds raised by their and other students. They answered questions, played games, sang and danced, and made friends.

At night they slept in a village farmhouse and woke to the sounds of roosters and cows and the smell of fried bread.

Here, Susan Secord and Laura Rog share their written reflections.

(Note: Tony Cervone, mentioned in these reflections,has developed a solar-powered small light that is being produced and sold in Kambi ya Simba and other villages in E. Africa. In the U.S., students are building the exact same light, called the “Taa Bora,” as a hands-on, environmental service-learning activity. He joined the teachers for their visit to Kambi ya Simba.)

Susan Secord, Boulder, CO

You can leave Africa. But Africa never leaves you. These were the words a friend spoke to me several months before I traveled to East Africa for the first time. It’s now more than four months since I returned home, and I can honestly say these words are true. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about my trip to Kenya and Tanzania.

Last summer my husband and I visited friends in Nairobi and then went on safari in northern Tanzania. We woke up to quiet dawns on the Serengeti, drove through lush forests on the top of Ngorongoro Crater, and saw every kind of African animal on our wish list – lions, giraffes, zebras, elephants, hippos, rhinos, wildebeests, warthogs, and many types of gazelles and antelope. But for me, one of the most memorable parts of our journey had to do with the true purpose of my trip: my five-day visit to the village of Kambi ya Simba.

lamp/flashlight especially designed by Tony Cervone for use in Tanzania.  I’ve also been teaching my students about the village of Kambi ya Simba through Barbara Cervone’s book In Our Village. After assembling the lamps the first year, my students decided to sell them to raise funds for school supplies for the Kambi ya Simba primary school. Tony graciously found a way to purchase these supplies in Arusha, Tanzania and to deliver them to the school on our behalf. After the second year of building the lamps in our classroom, my students again decided that they wanted to donate the proceeds to the village, and we expanded the project to become an all-school fundraiser. My trip to Kambi ya Simba was an outgrowth of this project and the logical next step in my own personal journey of learning about the developing world. I already felt a deep personal connection to the village and I wanted to make that connection more real.

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Laura Rog, Albion, NY

Before departing for Tanzania, I received numerous well wishes, warnings, and exclamations of how exciting this opportunity would be. But my favorite came from a respected friend, sharing in a pre-trip e-mail that “they say once the soil of Africa gets under your fingernails you can never get it out!” I immediately knew what she meant as we arrived at our first school in the Kambi ya Simba area, both in terms of the incredibly warm greeting we received from the students and staff, and the realization that you really never do get the brownish-red earth so characteristic of the country out of your nails while you are there.

I traveled to Tanzania with a good friend, Brent Talbot, a teacher and Ph.D. candidate in music education, on a bit of a “Hey, I might be going to Tanzania, want to go?” kind of whim, and eventually told enough people about the idea that through sheer ego we pretty much had to follow through with the trip. We booked our tickets online, complete with a little dance in front of the computer upon confirmation, and within a few days time realized how much lay ahead of us. The desire to revel in the African experience came from many angles - partly for a cultural experience different from my own, partly to see a more communal culture in action, and partly because I desired to just see what was out there in the world. Kambi ya Simba is everything the In Our Village (IOV) book describes it to be. A town with heart, schools with curious students and enthusiastic staff, people with a certain light in their eye and song in their soul; all aspects blend together to bring you to the realization of how important the IOV project is within the global framework and the significance we play as educators in exploring the world with our students.

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