The second-year University of Cincinnati student had never been on a plane but managed 16 hours of airtime, followed by a 10-hour arduous van ride whose final haul included a slog of dirt roads over rocky terrain that touched Africa’s Great Rift Valley and ended on the scenic shores of Lake Victoria.

It was an eventful start to a two-week service-learning trip for Elliott and a dozen other UC students as part of a cultural awareness and fact-finding mission. The trip across Tanzania — Shirati, Nyambogo, Burere and Roche villages — was organized by Village Life Outreach Project, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting poverty, improving education and making healthcare and clean water more accessible in northern Tanzania.

Elliott was nervous about flying for the first time, but one would never know it once he hit his final destinations. In Burere, he was high-fiving schoolchildren, who between classes flocked to greet visitors and offer warm welcomes.

In Nyambogo, Elliott learned that while the dominant languages are the native tongue of the Luo people along with Swahili, some children do speak decent English. 

It was there that he met Barack Obama. 

He thought the child’s introduction was a joke, but it’s a common name for children who are part of the Luo of Kenya and Tanzania. The former U.S. president is also of Luo ancestry and is revered there. 

The Luo are a major ethnic group in East Africa native to western Kenya and the Mara region of northern Tanzania and numbering about 4 million people. Their culture, customs and language were an important part of Elliott’s experience.

“People here are extremely kind and very outgoing,” explains Elliott, after his visit to Nyambogo. “They are very warm, they're very welcoming, and the kids are so sweet. They're sweet as can be. They're just the purest little souls.”

“I think the biggest surprise is how dedicated the teachers are to creating a positive learning environment for the children,” says Elliott. “You can tell that they really want the best for the children and they really want the children to learn and have a better life. They're very passionate about their teaching.”

Elliott was one of nine Marian Spencer Scholars who were joined on the trip by four NEXT Innovation Scholars, and two UC students part of Engineers Without Borders along with a team of faculty, staff, alumni, administrators and supporters. 

Roche, Nyambogo and Burere are the epicenter of nearly two decades of important community service partnerships formed with everyday Tanzanians; Village Life Outreach Project, which is based in the 1819 Innovation Hub of the University of Cincinnati; and the Shirati Health, Education and Development Foundation (SHED), a nongovernmental organization in Shirati.

More than 800 Bearcats — that’s students, faculty, staff and alumni from UC, UC Health and Cincinnati Children’s — have worked to advance a three-pronged mission driven by Village Life: ensuring the availability of clean water, improving education and providing access to healthcare.

Village Life was founded in 2003 by Chris Lewis, MD, a UC family and community medicine professor, and vice provost of academic affairs. Lewis tasked the students with gathering information about education, healthcare, clean water and other topics to assist Village Life with its on-going needs assessments to help shape future projects that could benefit these areas of rural Tanzania.

“We partner with our communities here in Tanzania to provide service, resources, technical know-how, but equally as important as the service we're providing is the lessons that we learn from them,” says Lewis. “Despite the lack of material wealth, I would argue that they are some of the wealthiest people on the planet, and they have something to give us.”

Both countries were at some point in their history ruled by the United Kingdom during the age of European colonialism. That influence is seen on the highways and rural dirt roads where left-hand driving is the rule. Other road etiquette is strictly Tanzanian and Kenyan: drivers in both nations share a survivalist’s mentality with the bigger vehicle taking preference.

Roads are bumpy, pavement is thin or nonexistent, and things happen quickly. Trucks, vans, motorbikes and pedestrians are rarely more than six inches apart. Accidents are much rarer than expected even when stop signs and traffic lights are nowhere to be found. Calm is more the rule and tempers show sparingly. Motorbikes can carry anything: sofas, coffins, even passengers of four.

“Everybody just respects each other here,” remarked Elliott, commenting on traffic flow. “It’s not the same as in Cincinnati.”

Popular dishes in Tanzania include Ugali, a porridge of maize (corn), sugar and water, along with dagaa, a small silver fish found in Lake Victoria. A Stoney Tangawizi is a tasty, intense Tanzanian ginger beer soft drink that’s also popular.

Akama, like many of the people in this northern region of Tanzania, is of Luo ancestry. His mother is from Kenya while his father is a Tanzanian. They live in Shirati. Akama has a younger sister, Daissa, an undergraduate in Tanzania studying finance and banking, and a younger brother, Bruce, who is a literature teacher at a secondary school.

“There is no wrong or right culture,” Akama told UC students, faculty and staff during a nightly debriefing session. “There is no good or bad culture. At the heart of our culture is to be respectful and that means respecting everyone’s position.”

Respect is at the cornerstone of Tanzanian culture, and children are taught to revere all elders, Akama says.

That didn’t go unnoticed by Lance Entsuah, a UC economics student and NEXT Innovation Scholar (NIS), during his interactions in the communities.

“I think about how nice and receptive the children are,” says Entsuah. “Even when we are driving into the villages, they seem to be very respectful. If the roles were reversed and there were a bunch of Tanzanian people driving around the United States and kids saw them, it would not be like that. It is definitely interesting to see how other people are welcoming us into their homes and villages.”

Akama says Tanzanian children are fascinated by visitors and by the difference seen in dress, mannerism and also nationality.

“For the children, everyone wants to say hi to you. Also, you are visitors and they don’t see you around, especially white people and the dominant complexion is black,” says Akama. “When they see white people, they wonder and are excited and want to see and learn more.”

The Tanzanian mainland is predominantly Christian while Islam is the dominant faith in coastal areas and near the islands of Zanzibar.

“We have tribes and people who believe in elder and African spirits,” explains Akama. “In Roche we have a hill site that, according to the elders, holds significant spiritual importance due to its historical use in ancestral activities."

Tanzania is one of the countries that has a reputation of peace and unity. Though there are more than 121 tribes, conflict between groups is minimal. Independence from the British for Tanzania came without bloodshed, a rarity on the African continent.

“Some tribes have chiefs,” says Akama. “They are influential people in the community, but the government doesn’t recognize them in a leadership role. But they are still influential in the community.”

Akama is completing his bachelor’s degree in public health at UC and is still determining what his future may hold. He could split his time between North America and Africa if certain circumstances occur or he could simply come home.

“I don’t mind living here in Shirati,” says Akama. “I can spend the rest of my life here. I love it.”

Water is certainly more accessible in each of the Tanzanian communities but what that means is residents use a few community faucets that many families share by filling buckets at the tap to take back home for cooking, bathing and washing. Only a few are lucky enough to have a tap at home.

This was Djafi’s third year visiting the three communities. He remembers working on the second phase of a water system for Burere after his first year at UC. 

“When we first heard the water filling up the system it was the highest point of my life,” says Djafi. “I won’t forget hearing everyone cheering and clapping and giving everyone hugs and seeing water coming out of these taps.”

A water project in Roche hit a milestone during the engineering students’ recent visit to Tanzania. The group was able to turn over a water project to the community for long-term maintenance.

“Our main goal was to close out the Roche project,” explains Das. “So, we’ve been working on this project for about six years now. We handed it over to the community because we believe they can maintain the system better than we can, and we’re not going to be here forever. We just want to make the system very self-sustainable.”

Takora Arnold, a second-year criminal justice major and a Marian Spencer Scholar, says clean water remains a topic that educators at schools in all the three communities continue to list as a concern.

“Our primary goal is to figure out what exactly their water situation is and try to see if there is anything that we can do to get the word out to help them,” says Arnold, who will help create a report about the water situation. 

“We have been talking to teachers, staff members and students as well,” she continues. “We are asking them what their struggles are and what their hopes for the future are and what their home life is like. We plan to present it to students at UC to call attention to the problem. Although water access has improved over the years, it is still a struggle for them.”

“We spoke to some people, and they were telling us all they want is to just have clean water so their people can stop dying. That made me want to cry, honestly. I just wish there was more we could do now for them.”

Village Life founder Chris Lewis remembers clean water was the top concern when he spoke with village leaders back in 2004.

“They said, ‘Hey, Doc, this is great,’” recalls Lewis. “‘You've brought these medicines. You've brought these health care students and professionals, but can you help us with access to clean water? Because half of what you all are going to be treating in these field clinics is coming from our people not having access to clean water.’ And now I look around and it's humbling to see that thousands and thousands of people now have access to clean water that didn't have that access 19 years ago.”

“By providing Uji, the students are able to concentrate better and they do better on standardized tests,” says Raj. “One school that received the Uji from SHED went from being the bottom-ranked school in the entire Royra District to being ninth in over 100 schools. This is a simple intervention that can make a relatively big difference in students' lives.”

NIS has been floating ways to make the program more sustainable for the future. That team consists of Raj, fifth-year economics student Lance Entsuah, fourth-year industrial design and fine arts student Cecelia Favorito and recent UC graduate in industrial design Haley Rich.

“Options have been to try to have the students farm some of the grain themselves, supplement the food with livestock and get additional funding from the community,” explains Raj. 

He says that in Nyambogo the school staff raise maize, while students monitor it. The maize is harvested twice a year and it provides a couple of weeks of food for the Uji project. NIS is investigating whether that effort could be replicated in Burere and Roche.

Many residents in each of the communities also raise chickens, but few people consume eggs because they want to raise more chicks, explains Raj. Maybe helping people better identify unfertilized eggs, which could become a source of protein, is another option to help bolster the nutritional needs of schoolchildren. NIS students also spoke to a chicken farmer in Nyambogo about the struggles she has in increasing her flock to inform their research.

“One of the challenges she faced was containing the chickens and use of chicken wire, which is very expensive,” says Raj. “Wire is a raw material so that’s why we have all these free-roaming chickens. We tried to come up with a way to contain the chickens more economically or a way to help more people raise additional chickens to supplement their diet.”

Mbathio Lo, a second-year computer science major at UC, says educators told her the Uji has brought many more students to the schools in Burere, sometimes filling classrooms to the brim. She also visited primary and secondary schools in Nyambogo with fellow Marian Spencer Scholars Jalen Tucker, a second-year cybersecurity major, and Maxwell Lawson, a second-year accounting and finance major. The group looked at community life as part of its project on this trip.

“The people are so interested in education, but they don’t have all the things they need to make it happen,” says Lo. “When we visited the secondary school one of the teachers was telling me how really interested the students were in learning about information technology, but they don’t have a single computer in the school. Just think about it and how different it is in the United States. Here you have so many computers and there the whole school didn’t have even one.”

“Our trip was a life-changing experience,” says Lo. “There’s just so many things to learn.”

NIS is also working on an additional project that would allow the students to partner with the Nyambogo Secondary School to develop a curriculum that can help Tanzanian school children realize all their career options. That curriculum would not be internet-based but rather shared with educators so they can offer it to their students. Raj says many of the students see only a few pathways forward, such as becoming a physician or teacher, and that it could be highly impactful for students to understand the diversity of skills that can have an impact on one’s community and lead to success, beyond the ones that are traditionally seen and respected.

“We have experience in instructional design and curriculum planning so we are hopeful,” says Raj.