Out of Warwick, into Africa

Erin Gleason of Warwick reflects on volunteer service in Africa Warwick - Erin Gleason, a 28-year-old Warwick native, recently completed a two-month volunteer service project in one of the poorest regions of Tanzania, a country located centrally on Africa’s eastern coast. Volunteering through a British charity, “Volunteer Africa,” Gleason traded in her corporate job as a global portfolio manager in the Worldwide Technology department at Pfizer Inc. and her Manhattan apartment for living in a camp and working at a job making bricks by hand, plastering ceilings and painting to build a dispensary which would serve all the clinical needs in Mvae, a tiny and poor village deep in central Tanzania. She also used some of her spare time teaching children at a local primary school, an experience she termed one of the happiest of her incredible journey. Though the work, at times, was challenging and the living conditions primitive, Gleason said her trip to Tanzania represented a fulfillment of a lifelong ambition to travel to the African continent. Gleason is a 2001 graduate of Georgetown University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in foreign languages. Her degree at Georgetown and career at Pfizer exposed her to citizens and cultures from around the world. She learned of the work of the British-based charity, Volunteer Africa, through an internet search, and she jumped at the opportunity. Ending her corporate career at Pfizer also made sense since Gleason was exploring returning to school full-time for her Masters in international development. She thought it wise “to experience the subject matter first-hand before investing time and tuition studying it from a book.” Volunteer Africa was established to give people from around the world the chance to work on community initiated projects in developing countries like Tanzania. In return for hosting these international volunteers, the host organization receives donations from the volunteers. Crash course in Swahili “Volunteer Africa seemed to be real grass roots in its mission,” said Gleason. “It offered the real hands-on experience I was looking for. Many of the other programs were simply based on raising funds.” Gleason would end up in Tanzania where Volunteer Africa is aligned with the local non-governmental organization HAPA, Health Action Promotion Association. HAPA operates in Singida, an impoverished region in central Tanzania, where volunteers like Gleason work alongside villagers building projects such as the construction of village dispensaries (health centers), school classrooms, pit latrines and staff houses for teachers and medical staff. Gleason’s expedition began in late summer when she traveled from New York to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, and one-time capital bordering the Indian Ocean on Africa’s east coast. There, and later during the first week in Singida town, Gleason was immersed in cultural lessons and a crash course in the Swahili language. Again, her degree from Georgetown in foreign languages allowed Gleason to pick up Swahili rather quickly. Following seven days training, Gleason was assigned to work in a small rural village of Mvae, about a 90-minute drive through back roads from central Singida. She was the only American in her group as she was joined by volunteer workers from England, Ireland, Australia, Holland and Nigeria. Together, they worked with local villagers building a dispensary which would eventually serve all the clinical needs for Mvae and surrounding villages. The best part of the trip A village like Mvae needs many things, Gleason learned, and helping to build a medical center is one. Teachers are desperately needed as well. Gleason learned that her local village had 800 school aged children and only four permanent teachers to educate them. Even before the start of her daily shift of hauling bricks, Gleason began each day, along with another volunteer from England, at the local school offering help to the overburdened faculty. “I taught standard three and six levels which are about ages 5-6 and 12-13 respectively,” Gleason said. “Teaching was the best part of the entire experience because I got to know so many kids so quickly. At first they were very frightened of us but once they knew us to be safe, they quickly grew to love us and be quite curious about everything about us, including my hair!” Gleason and the other volunteers pooled their resources at the end of their service and made a donation of $500 to the town which would enable villagers to buy 110 new school kits (including uniforms, sandals, pen, pencil, schoolbag and notebook) for underprivileged children in Mvae. Because of a requirement in Tanzania that children attending school must possess these items, this gift by the volunteers meant that these 110 students would now be able to continue their education or attend school for the first time. “That was the best part of the trip,” she said. New perspectives Despite her anxious parents, Robert and Judy Gleason of Warwick, and sister, Lauren, who lives in the Washington, D.C., area, anxiously awaiting her return home, Gleason extended her stay in Africa with a trip to Zanzibar, a Tanzanian island off the northeast coast of Dar es Salaam. She later met an American friend and traveled to South Africa for a safari, a tour of Cape Town and sampling African wines in the wine country. She even terrorized her father by e-mailing him of her daredevil experience of diving with great white sharks in Cape Town and abseiling 112 meters down the side of Table Mountain, South Africa’s famous landmark. (Abseiling is a challenging rock-climbing technique of descending through the use of a fixed rope). “I feel as if I was given a wonderful gift being able to do this volunteer service in Africa,” Gleason said. “You cannot comprehend the tremendous poverty you witness there; the lack of basic things that we take for granted. “Seeing it for myself has given me new perspectives on a number of things, she added. “I admire the courage and commitment of the citizens of Tanzania for continuing to work hard to build their villages and help each other. I also am grateful for living in such a wonderful country like the United States of America. And I am thankful for my loving family and friends at home and the new ones I made while in Tanzania who supported and encouraged me throughout this journey I will never forget.” This story was provided by Mary Gima.