August 18, 2015 | Leave a comment The nurse prescribing malaria pills raised her eyebrows at me. So did the Walmart cashier. A mom said I would die. So did my mom. It hit her last minute and she screamed at me that it was all a scam and I was never coming back. I still got on that plane. This was my first time backpacking alone. I’d only have myself to rely on for the next month. Africa had been calling my name for over a year. First it was the wildlife drawing me into an obsession, but then it became just seeing that huge mass of land at all. By backpacking, I meant budget travel. No fancy program that provides insurance and charges thousands of dollars. No safari lodges and private tours that shuttle me directly from Nairobi to the game parks, completely cut off from local values and culture. It was just me, one backpack, a box of medical surplus, and a host family who would feed and house me in return for helping out at their rural school. I didn’t know anyone who had been to Africa so I decided to be first. I trusted it to be safe. I knew people are good people. A 2-hour drive to the airport, one domestic flight, a day wandering to the Red Light District of Amersterdam, two red-eye flights, an 8-hour bus ride, a 1-hour matatu ride (public transport via burning van with a cracked dashboard and at least 20 other passengers smushed in), and one motorcycle ride later, I walked into my new home. Then what? 1. I was right I was fine. I was in full control of my own safety. I had a month for some soul-searching and reflecting on all I saw. The trip was self-validating. Confirmation that I could handle the real world, and I could handle it solo. That was always something that held me back. I wanted to see the world, but I didn’t have time to wait for someone else who could join me. No one tried to hurt me, at most they just wanted to scam me. 100% of my being enjoyed the challenges and the travels. My best decisions are consistently made by earnestly trusting myself. 2. The system is flawed Take offense, but after returning in one piece I’ve repeatedly summarized to friends that Africa is the world’s trash can. But really. All street vendors sell secondhand clothes. No two styles are alike. The shoes already have footprints in them. During my Kili trek, a young porter walked by wearing a Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) shirt, and suddenly these images of much wealthier kids from my high school flashed through my mind. As you read this, these people, even in Nairobi, are living in flies. The village latrines had a constant supply of writhing maggots. In Kenya, HIV prevalence sits around 6% and malaria is one of the top causes of death. No different than many other backwards places. I interned at Nyangiela Clinic. It was great that their services were free, but dependence on Western aid is just not sustainable. The same goes for “sponsorships,” something I had never heard of until I had lived here. Children and families who can’t afford tuition try their best to get visiting foreigners to pay it instead. It’s made many worlds worth of a difference for tons of Kenyans, but not every kid can be the cutest, the sweetest, or the brightest. It relies on a lot of brown-nosing and incredible luck, which means it’s a remedy that only helps the problem, but doesn’t fix the core issue and provide means of independence. It was for that reason that I decided not to sponsor (~30USD per month) a 10-year-old boy whose actions and intelligence have touched my heart in a one-of-a-kind way. Millions of young American volunteers and grant funding doesn’t offer enough long-term impact. Historically, other countries have clawed their way out of such feedback loops by starting with strong government leaders who are not only competent, but also genuine about their goals to help civilians. Africans repeatedly told me of how often a project, say for starting up a primary school, would equate to a shitty wooden sign on the side of the road and vanished money. NGO’s may be a better option. However, it is still common to ask first-world visitors for more than necessary, and not actually spend it on the orphans or patients in need. 3. I was a walking bank I remember going on runs and children would point and scream “Msungu!” and chase after me, repeatedly ask me to buy them mandazis, or donuts.* The teachers at school made $30 a month. In Tanzania, the average income sits around a dollar a day. They didn’t believe me when I said there are homeless people in America too. When locals saw my light skin, they treated me differently. They clung to me and tried to get my number and were desperate to build a lasting relationship. It didn’t matter if I was just a fellow passenger in the matatu and our entire window of crossing paths with each other lasted only two hours. 1USD is about 100 Kenyan shillings, so any average Westerner is suddenly a jackpot. A way out. One of my snapchats- cellular data was popular even in rural areas Invited to dinners again… …and again I firsthand saw a girl from Texas ordering everyone around. Whatever she said was whatever was done. She took off her shirt in a bar and exchanged it with one hanging on the wall. The servers spoke with her and then just accepted it. Her shirt had the logo of the nonprofit she founded; she now works in Tanzania full-time teaching English to orphans, is fluent in Swahili, and has even adopted a baby off the street. No matter how noble that is, everyone at the hostel resented her presence. Her visiting friends from college said she used to be just another sorority girl nobody cared about. Now this girl literally lives in her own multi-bedroom house with her baby boy wrapped in beautiful cloths, suffering from some weird I’m-saving-the-world-but-I’m-a-princess kind of complex. Watching her teenage brother and his friends visit and get busted for a giant bag of weed discretely hidden in the smack middle of the hostel dorm floor, and then blow $50 on Jack Daniel’s during a night out in a country where the largest bill, 10,000 shillings, is around 4USD, I had a feeling none of this would exist if the parents weren’t bankrolling the majority of expenses at the end of the day. That sentence was long. But this ties back to my previous point: the system is flawed if the core education of so many Tanzanian schoolchildren depends on the wallet of one Texan family. *Msungu is a Swahili word synonymous with “white person” or “foreigner,” but actually means “aimless wanderer” and was first used to label European explorers trying to colonize the area.