Do Something!

By Niwaeli Elisante

A close relative finished Form Four in October last year, packed her bags and moved home for what would be a six months holiday. “I am waiting for results,” she would respond when people asked her what she was doing. The sole activity of her previous holidays had been studying: extra classes for upcoming topics, study groups for discussion and scouting of past papers to practice exam taking. Stuck between O and A – levels, she stood in limbo, unsure of what to do, with no purpose but to wait. All her friends were doing the same thing, so did all the form four graduates before her. So wait she did.

She settled into a routine that involved sleeping frequently, reading very occasionally and eating enough to compensate for four years of the boarding school ugali and beans. Her holiday coincided with an uneventful time of the year in our community whose major activity is farming, so this idle routine barely surprised anyone.  For reasons unknown to me, she finally snapped out of her limbo and volunteered at a hospital, but this was after months of little engagement and productivity spent at home.

It frustrates me that social engagement — especially through the spirit of volunteering — is so palpably absent among us Tanzanian youth, to the extent that voluntary service stands to many as a foreigners realm. A good example is Cross Cultural Solutions (CCS), an international non–profit organisation that prides itself in the diversity of the volunteers it attracts and its geographical distribution across the globe. On visiting its Moshi compounds I was struck — as I was two years ago when I worked with the organisation — by its demographics. The roles of the locals and that of the foreigners are sort of polarities. Almost all volunteers, about forty at a time, are non-locals, with three or two local volunteers. The staff, of course, are all locals.

My impression is that locals in Moshi, and I daresay most of Tanzania, think volunteering is for citizens from industrialised nations, the ones with supposed resources and time to travel to far away countries to teach English, work in primary health care, to bring progress. How much progress they can bring in the short time they spend teaching, playing with orphaned children or visiting a juvenile correction centre with limited knowledge of the language, the culture, the local geography, is indeed a good question. Our form four and form six graduates as they “wait” for six months could teach children, work in health campaigns and engage in environmental change perhaps as, or more efficiently and productively than their foreign counterparts.

I should emphasize that I am, in no way, discrediting the time, immense effort and work that all the international volunteers helping primary school teachers and students and healthcare providers. Their work is globalization at its best, with these volunteers serving where they are most needed. But where are the local volunteers?

It is the responsibility of everyone to whom a youth tells that “I am waiting for results” to tell them to not just sit home and wait, but to go to a clinic, a hospital, a school, a kindergarten nearby and volunteer your time.

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Vijana FM would like to thank Niwaeli for this insightful opinion piece.

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