Teaching Children in the Heart of Africa

Michael Kremer '85 was a typical Social Studies concentrator looking for a little real-world experience after graduation. Interested in Africa, he decided to take a three-week tour of Kenya in fall 1985.

He stayed for 11 months--and in his mind, at least, he's never left. Kremer is founder and executive director of World Teach, a non-profit Harvard group that has sent 175 college-aged students to teach in rural Kenya and China since 1987. To hear the Winthrop House alumnus talk, making the four-year transition from undergraduate life at Harvard to teaching in Kenya to working in Cambridge supplying teachers has been a matter of course.

"It's a little bit different from before," Kremer says. But, he admits, creating an international development program--for parts of the world which have never known televisions, private automobiles or libraries and in which volunteers can teach with greater flexibility than for larger groups like the Peace Corps--is cause for pride.

A branch of the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA)--a large branch with its $300,000 to $400,000 annual budget--World Teach recruits student volunteers from 3000 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. A World Teach staff of four full-time workers and many more part-time employees recruit, orient and speed the paperwork for dozens of volunteers each semester, placing them with Kenyan farming community leaders in Kenyan schools.

"We basically think of ourselves as a job placement service, even though we're not really a placement service," says World Teach Associate Director Sydney Rosen '87, who spent the year after her junior year as a writer for a Nairobi, Kenya-based branch of UNESCO. Running World Teach "is much harder than it looks, actually," she says

Indeed, for World Teach, without the broad base and political support enjoyed by organizations like the U.N. or the Peace Corps, delivering aid to the Third World runs risks not readily visible.

Citing growing unemployment among skilled Kenyan workers, Assistant Professor of Government Jennifer Widner sees the possibility that foreign teaching groups could grow increasingly unpopular among government leaders. "What they [officials] would really like," Widner says, "is for the U.S. to give them the money to pay Kenyans to teach."

Going Beyond Politics

But World Teach volunteers seldom concern themselves with politics. "We're a pretty apolitical program," says Kremer.

Indeed, volunteers seem engaged in a more intimate struggle, World Teach leaders say.

Volunteering students pay World Teach $3,100 for airfare and administrative costs to teach in Kenyan schools five hours a day for one year. Though most volunteers have no formal teaching experience, they work in community schools, called "Harambee," each of which can serve anywhere from 10 to 500 students. As many as 200 can pass through a single teacher's classroom in a day.

After work, teachers go home to small, concrete block houses, usually without electricity or running water. The teachers--20 to 25-year-olds who could be from Los Angeles or Topeka or Birmingham or Manhattan--spend their evenings under kerosene lamps, usually alone, writing letters and reading. The nearest movie theater or library can be a five-hour bus ride away.

Malaria can strike as many as half the teachers each year, Rosen says.

And Harambee schools pay their teachers $66 a month.

"It's a fantastic experience," says Elizabeth Oye, former field staffer. Stationed in Kisumu, a town in Western Kenya near Lake Victoria, Oye worked to keep church groups directing the harambee schools in touch with World Teach, completing paperwork for American volunteers and training new teachers.

The most beautiful aspect is "probably the Kenyan people," Oye says. Oye, who now lives near Binghamton, New York, marked that despite cultural differences, she developed friendships that she will keep for a lifetime.

Rosen tells of broader-ranging attractions. "Most people do it for a combination of getting foreign service experience, doing service work and the adventure of it," she says.

"I imagine it's out of the ordinary" considering what the volunteers do in Kenya, Rosen says. "I suppose I was interested in it because it's so remote."

Water From Springs and Water Tanks

There are difficulties for foreigners used to greater wealth exists in the countryside. Beyond the farmlands--which grow corn, bananas, beans and sugar cane amid green, rolling hills in Kakamega--lies a region that is severely undeveloped.

Elizabeth Brown, who taught in Kakamega and returned to the United States last May, recalls families living in mud houses, children studying at night by lamplight if they had any light at all and farms connected to schools and one another by dirt roads.

Education, though available nationwide, seldom exceeds the elementary level for most people in rural areas.

"As African countries go, Kenya is well off," says Oye. "There's not hunger, but there's malnutrition."

At Brown's two-room concrete house, students delivered water from local springs or rain tanks. She used a kerosene lamp and stove for light and cooking. It was "just a house and that's it," she says.

Still, she says, "I was pretty lucky. I lived with a woman." Loneliness and isolation are major problems for the teachers. "There's no stimulation out there at night," says Brown.

"Yeah, when you're in a village without electricity and it's night," Rosen says, "it gets pretty dark, it gets remarkably dark. There's a pretty big temptation to go to bed early."

For women, additional cultural constraints become confining. "As Americans we're used to having a certain amount of privacy, freedom, especially women," says Brown, "Kenyans have less privacy and are more critical of late night parties and overnight guests."

But such limitations ultimately amount to little more than inconveniences, teachers say. Brown says her year ultimately taught her more than how to teach in a classroom. "I enjoyed being stripped down to my basic personality and my basic attitudes...[without] those pressures which make people act in a certain way. What you wear and say and look like didn't matter there," she says.

"People were still dancing around with painted up faces, dressed in animal skins" on occassions of special ceremonies, Brown recalls. "Even though these are people who go to school...they still maintain a lot of local culture," Brown says.

Success in Its Own Way

For World Teach, having sent nearly 200 teachers to Kenya in two years, Rosen claims a share of success. "We're doing very well overall," she says. So much so that World Teach expanded this year to include missions in China, and soon in Botswana.

Volunteer continue to send applications and World Teach continues to contact more schools, Rosen says. Teachers from Harvard make up the largest delegation from any college at 10 students, and Rosen was recently name to succeed Kremer as executive director.

All in all, World Teach has lived up to its original recruitment posters in spirit, if not in letter. Kremer began recruiting teachers for the Kenyan schools in 1987 with the slogan "How to become wealthy on $66 a month."