Megan Sarver of Clinton traveled halfway around the world to liberate her inner altruist.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Africa and help out,” she said. “It was an amazing experience. It makes you appreciate what you have.”
Sarver, 18, who graduated from South Whidbey High School in June, spent six weeks this past summer in Tanzania, one of the poorest nations on Earth.
“Community service is close to my heart, and I thought this would be the best way to experience it,” she said.
She traveled to the Bagamoyo region of Tanzania on the east coast of Africa to teach in a primary school, but spent much of her time at an orphanage on the other side of the village.
She said the combined experience warmed her heart and changed her life.
“They were the happiest kids on Earth,” Sarver said, “with big, giant smiles. I got extremely attached to them. Before I left for Africa, I wanted to go into environmental health or science.
“Now,” she said, “all I want to think about is working for an NGO (non-governmental organization) or starting a foundation for kids.”
Sarver, whose mother, Debbie Mahler, is finance director for the city of Langley, traveled to Tanzania through Cross Cultural Solutions, a New York service organization offering volunteer programs throughout the world.
She went there to teach fourth grade in Bagamoyo, a coastal fishing region near Zanzibar. Mornings, she taught the reading and writing of English, and skills such as colors and shapes and how to tell time.
Meanwhile, another woman in the same program, a student at Duke University in North Carolina, was posted at the nearby orphanage.
Sarver started walking over there in the afternoons to help out.
Wednesdays and Saturdays, she and the other volunteers and about 25 children would pile into a bus and head for the beach.
The rainy season had just ended, and the weather was “perfect,” Sarver said, sunny and about 72 degrees, with an occasional warm cloudburst.
“That was a huge, exciting thing for them,” Sarver said of the bus trips. “They would always be singing, ‘If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.’ It was pretty amazing.”
She said she picked up a little Swahili, an intensely phonetic language. She sounded out her favorite phrase, which she translated as “crazy like a banana.”
She and the children would whisper it into each others’ ears, “little games like that,” she said.
Despite the grinding poverty, everyone was extremely welcoming, Sarver said of the village. “You couldn’t go down the street without saying hello and having a long conversation with everyone. It was more important to engage in a conversation than to be on time.”
Tanzania, primarily an agricultural nation, has a population of 39 million. The life expectancy is 50 years. More than 1.4 million people, or nine percent of them, are infected with HIV/AIDS.
Tanzania, which includes 130 ethnic groups, harbors more refugees than any other African country; 540,000 alone from Burundi and the Republic of Congo. It has a per capita income of about $800 a year.
Sarver’s orphanage, a non-governmental agency called Imano Upendo Na Matumainoi, or IMUMA, was established in 2006 to care for abandoned children from three regions.
It currently looks after 48 children, 12 of whom live there. The orphanage is run by a Tanzanian couple, Shariff Pascal Yusuph and his wife, Asha, whom everyone calls “Mama Asha,” Sarver said.
“The problems these children face on a daily basis include poverty, poor nutrition, divorce, broken homes and lack of love, support and guidance,” according to IMUMA’s literature.
“Many of the parents and grandparents of these children are jobless and have taken refuge in the urban areas of Tanzania. Many of these children are victims of child labor, sex and drug abuse, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS and malaria.”
The orphanage, a bare-bones operation, has five rooms: two classrooms, two bedrooms and one storage room. The Yusuphs hope to raise the money to expand, Sarver said.
She said she and other volunteers tore down and rebuilt bathrooms at the orphanage, and relocated a goat shed that was too close to the children’s beds. Cleanup days also were common.
“One of the sad things,” she said, “is that every time it rains, the kids have to wait to eat.”
The Yusuphs prepare all the meals, but they do it outside. “That’s one minor thing that we would never encounter,” Sarver said.
“You didn’t see many kids go without food,” she said, “but you could tell there was some malnutrition.”
She said the local diet centered around fried bananas and a white maize porridge that was “like a sponge cake.”
“You roll it into a ball and dip it in a sauce, maybe made of tomatoes and onions,” Sarver said. “I thought it was great.”
She told of one touching incident. An 8-year-old girl was feeling ill after school, so Sarver took a book to read to her while the girl rested on her mattress. The girl lay down and stared steadily and longingly at the mattress tag. On the tag was picture of a mother and child hugging happily.
“That was really intense,” Sarver said.
Still, she said the IMUMA orphans are luckier than many in the world. “The entire community takes you in,” Sarver said. “Not like orphanages here. They’re pretty fortunate in that aspect.”
When it came time to leave Tanzania, a 9-year-old girl begged to come along.
“She attached herself to me,” Sarver said. “That was really hard.”
On their last trip together to the beach, the day took on a somber atmosphere, she said.
“Mama Asha and I broke down in tears,” Sarver said. “Everybody was hugging. It was a pretty emotional day.”
“I promised everyone I’d be back next summer,” she said. “Where there’s a will or a way, I’ll be back next summer.”
Since her return to the island, Sarver has been attending the South Whidbey program of Skagit Valley College, and she plans to transfer to the University of Washington for winter quarter to study social service or environmental science.
She said her only international travel before Tanzania was trips to Canada and Mexico. A friend is trying to talk her into going to India to do some organic farming, a prospect she finds intriguing.
But Africa has secured a place in her heart.
“I’ll continue to go back there as often as I can to see all the people I love,” she said.
To find out more about IMUMA, or to help those in need there, call 360-821-1234 or e-mail msarver5607@mysvc.skagit.edu.
