Global Engagement

Mar 27 2023

Thursday March 23, 2023 We started our day meeting Destiny at Paroma Primary school on the outskirts of Musoma. This is a private “English Medium” school – meaning it teaches students all subjects using English instead of Kiswahili – for...

Mar 25 2023

As our second week of visits to service locations concluded, students and leaders came to the realization that this chapter of SST is quickly drawing to a close.  The end of SST always brings a mixture of emotions; sadness, joy,...

Mar 22 2023

Saturday March 18 – Monday March 20 Saturday mid-day we arrived in Kemgesi, a short 1 hour drive from Mugumu. We met Billy and Emily who were hanging out in the their favorite canteen on main street Kemgesi. It was...

Mar 21 2023

This past week we set out on our cherished SST tradition of visits to students at their service locations.  Our first stop was to visit our students in the cloud forest and Amazonian rainforest locations on the west and east...

Mar 20 2023

Thursday March 16 & Friday March 17 We left Shirati on Thursday morning and made a quick run to the border so that our family could extend our visas for another 90 days…. the 30 minutes in Kenya was a...

Mar 15 2023

Tuesday – Wednesday March 14-15, 2023 After a short drive Tuesday morning from Nyayero to Shirati, we met the three students studying in Shirati, Annalise, Annika, and Tyson. The rains have begun which meant the drive was a bit slippery and our...

Mar 15 2023

I have to admit, I was nervous. As I stood by the medical center in the crisp morning air and watched students continue to file out of a charter bus, my pulse increased. I was tasked to act as a...

Mar 13 2023

Monday March 13, 2023 Today we drove from Musoma to Nyayero to visit Irving Matute who is teaching at Nyayero Secondary School. We arrived in time to see the remaining 20 minutes of his English teaching lesson. Wow, he is...

Mar 12 2023

Sunday March 12 Our silence on the blog has been noticeable perhaps! We have let the students settle into their service placements and now we are about to launch our service tour to visit each of them. We will leave...

Mar 12 2023

Blog: Week 1 of Service Isa H. On our way to our service town in the Ecuadorian Cloud Forest, Lisa and I weren’t quite sure what to expect. With nervous stomachs and bladders, we sat on the bus for about...

Feb 28 2023

Monday Feb. 20 – Train from Dar to Arusha This will be a lifelong memory…. taking the train from Dar to Arusha took about 20 hours. The best part is that it included a night in bed being rocked to...

Feb 28 2023

Our final week of the study portion of SST was an eventful one.   It began with the widely celebrated Ecuadorian national holiday of Carnaval. This pre-lenten four-day party involves getting soaking wet and covered in foam in many parts of...

Feb 20 2023

This past week we set out on a journey south through the Ecuadorian Andes to discover more of this stunning landscape and the people who inhabit it.  As we wound our way around incomprehensibly deep gorges, steep mountain passes, and...

Feb 19 2023

Sunday Feb. 19, 2023 This week marks our last week in Dar es Salaam before we head through the Serengeti toward our service locations. On Monday Feb. 20th we will leave on the night train from Dar to go to...

Feb 15 2023

Thursday February 16, 2023 Our focus this week has been to continue to explore the challenges in mapping ecological communities on the complexity of social communities. As we learned last week studying mangrove and fisheries management, it takes creative resolve...

Feb 13 2023

As the current SST’ers celebrated the one-month anniversary of their SST adventure, they experienced the unique sights, sounds, and smells of an open-air market, helped prepare a traditional Ecuadorian meal, learned some Latin dance, spent time with refugees hearing their...

Feb 11 2023

Saturday Feb 11, 2023 Thursday and Friday were spectacular. We received an introductory lecture by Aquafarms Organization AFO on Thursday afternoon to learn of their work in marine biology conservation. We were impressed for multiple reasons. Firstly, this NGO was...

Feb 08 2023

Wed. February 8th, 2023 Sunday included attendance at church in the morning followed by a quick lunch so we could get to the national stadium for an international friendly between Simba – one of the premier TZ professional club teams...

Feb 05 2023

As students continue their march through the SST experience, encounters with new landscapes, new cultures, and new sensory experiences pound out their steady drum beat each day…..  One of the true challenges of SST is to fully absorb the daily...

Feb 04 2023

Saturday Feb. 4, 2023 This week we have continued to explore various components of life in Dar. Thursday afternoon we met with Dr. Shreya Shah from Regency Medical Center who gave a presentation linking healthcare challenges with environmental attributes. For...

Feb 01 2023

Wednesday Feb 1, 2023 The students just left our apartment in Upanga to head home after a good discussion of the week’s events. We have been exploring the colonial history of Tanzania and the independence movement championed by Tanzania’s first...

Jan 30 2023

As we reflect on this past week, it is hard to absorb all we saw and experienced in the last seven days.  The SST experience continued its daily sensory buffet of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and the unique feel of...

Jan 29 2023

Sunday Jan. 29, 2023 We spent this weekend in Bagamoyo, a town about a 90 minute drive north of Dar es Salaam also directly on the Indian Ocean. The town is much smaller than Dar, but was the setting of...

Jan 26 2023

Thursday Jan. 26th Wow, the last few days have been a flurry of activity! Tuesday and Thursday we visited the University of Dar es Salaam for our last two history lectures: the first on the Swahili Civilization and the second...