African
Dream with Faith
“Life is either a
daring adventure or nothing.”
----Helen Keller
I simply had an African Dream since a young child;
I was altogether excited to finally realize my dream in Kenya.
During my 7-week-stay in Nairobi,
Kenya, I have to admit, what I have done to the children here was very limited.
In fact, I am the one who has been cheered, motivated, and inspired the most.
As a past intern, I would like to remind all the new comers, it definitely will
be the memory that you can cherish in the whole lifetime.
With the arrangements of Tofauti on the move
under the AIESEC Strathmore umbrella, I have been to three schools, either by
visiting or teaching, where there are so many lovely kids and kind teachers.
However, the common thing is that, all of them are non-formal schools.
Therefore, compared to the normal schools, they cannot get the subsidies from
the government, which result in harsh living standards for the kids. Situations
can be as severe as living in a flooded small house with 16 or more kids in 8
beds, living in hunger, and even have no access to the clean water e.g. Faith school
during the rainy season.
My main teaching responsibility was in the
Vijito School of Scream Africa in Embakasi area. From my over one month period
of experience in teaching, I really enjoyed the time spent with all these
lovely kids in the school.
Teaching and learning is a mutual experience,
that is to say, they are both affected by each other. By teaching kids math, I
learnt some Kiswahili, which is the most popular language in Africa. I shared
my stories with the teachers about my living in Canada, Australia and they also
shared their stories in return. In fact, Chinese here are very popular and
warmly welcomed by Kenyan people due to many reasons like the great support from
hard working Chinese engineering of building the roads and all the imported
cheap products made in China. However, still quite a large amount of people
have the really hilarious perception of the Chinese people. They simply
consider everybody from China knows Kungfu, as those well-known Chinese Kungfu
movies acted by Jackie Chan or Jet Li have taken a large portion in their
childhood life.
In terms of the society, Kenya has many
similarities with my home country China, especially the education system. It is
something that both countries should focus and to make some progress. Instead
of “spoon-feeding” type of teaching, students should have more time in
exploring their own interests than studying longer hours on so many subjects
that are not very necessary for their future career every day. The high school
entrance exams as well as University entrance exam are still a tough step for
students from both of the countries.
The living
environment for the kids maybe much simpler than my own childhood back in
China, but surprisingly, I see no sorrow on their face. They can be cheered simply by a bag of biscuits,
because they have gratitude to the kind God. They pray every day because they
have belief, they have faith. And this is actually what we volunteers should
think about, and learn about.
Apart from volunteering teaching, I
also travelled a bit to Kakamega to see the biggest rainforest in the whole
Kenya , and also went to Konza to visit a friend. More vitally, I challenged myself by climbed to
the top of the highest mountain in whole Africa—Kilimanjaro. This experience
means a great deal of things to me. It not only pushed my limit beyond a higher
level, but made me believed that persistence is paramount in doing everything
well.
Personally, I prefer travelling than reading
books due to the fact that travelling gives me more chances to meet different
kinds of people. By interacting with them, I got motivated, and be able to move
on with new inspirations. From the naïve purpose of searching my own African
dream at the beginning, to finally deeply moved by the people here and decided
to have faith in life. It is definitely a big change in my perspective.
My stories with my African dream will sure
continue. I will not only bring all the precious memory back, but to encourage
more people to step into this dream land.
One thing I
will keep in mind; when you want to do something beneficial to the society as a
whole, you need faith.
Yichao (Leon) Jin
AIESEC UBC committee member
yichaoj@student.unimelb.edu.au
June 16, 2012
