WASHINGTON – Georgetown University women's golf junior Elizabeth Nguyen spent the 2019 summer in Tanzania where she spent 10 weeks learning the language and culture of the east African country, as well as interning for IntraHealth International. GUHoyas.com was able to catch up with Nguyen to learn more about her experience
 
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This summer I was fortunate enough to receive a Boren Scholarship to study Swahili in Tanzania. The Boren Scholars program is funded by the State Department and the National Security Education program to send American students overseas to learn critical languages. I would be in Tanzania for almost 10 weeks both taking classes in Swahili and working at IntraHealth International, an NGO in Dar es Salaam.
 
Upon arrival in Tanzania, I decided to take advantage of my first week in Tanzania and spent it with my brother and two friends attempting to climb Africa's tallest peak: Mount Kilimanjaro. We took the Machame route and took 7 days to reach Uhuru point at over 19,000 feet.
 
Upon arrival in Dar es Salaam, I moved in with a host family on the University of Dar es Salaam campus. My daily routine in Dar started at sunrise, around 6am, and included going on a run before attending my Swahili class in the morning from 9 a.m. to noon. I would either walk the half-an-hour route to my school or catch a "dala dala" which was the local bus you could catch for 400 shillings (about 17 U.S. cents). I would pass fruit stands and ladies in the morning frying cassava for breakfast. I was the only student in my class and my teacher, Mwalimu Kindole and I, moved through the language very quickly learning how to read, write and speak from the most elementary level. Around noon, I would head over to the IntraHealth office and work at my internship for the afternoon. IntraHealth in Tanzania focuses mainly on a project to prevent HIV/AIDS through VMMC (voluntary medical male circumcisions). Circumcision is targeted as one of the best preventions because once a heterosexual man is circumcised, he is 60% less likely to contract HIV and less likely to contract other STDs as well. However, depending on the local tribe, religion and culture of the various regions of Tanzania circumcision is sometimes stigmatized or not practiced. For some groups, circumcision is even a public event performed without anesthesia when a boy is transitioning to manhood. I started by jumping around the various departments depending on which ones needed the most help any given week. I began mostly in finance and transitioned to a project in monitoring and evaluation for the remainder of my time. This included updating and backlogging data on the prevalence of HIV and circumcisions for the various regions in Pepfar software and then mapping the data on GIS tools to visualize the areas of greatest need. Whenever I found some spare time in the office I was assigned to a broad range of other tasks including translation, meeting with local partners and gathering data on the latest research in VMMC such as the Shang Ring technique. In the evenings, I would either go back to the house and play with my host sisters or head to the Mwenge wood carvers market. There, I joined other students in teaching English to the woodcarvers and vendors in order to help them increase their business. While there, they would in return teach us how to carve figures out of the ebony wood they have mastered. Throughout the weeks, I slowly transformed my piece into a twiga (giraffe) with lots of help from the skilled carvers.
 
Once home, I would eat dinner with my host family and occasionally even cook with them. We ate the Tanzanian staples such as ugali, which is a thick corn paste you eat by rolling into small balls with your right hand, or chips mayai, which was a French fry omelet of sorts sold on every street. Most nights, we would have ugali, rice or chapati with beans, beef or fish. For dessert, we dined on the delicious fresh fruit grown nearby such as pineapples, oranges, passion fruit, young coconuts, or papaya. I would buy fruit on the way home from work in the evenings and my host mom did her shopping at the local markets.
 
Over weekends I would try my best to see as much of the country as possible. I was fortunate enough to be able to travel with a group of students from Princeton University on some of these trips. We traveled to Bagamoyo, the old capital of the country with ruins of colonialism, and Zanzibar, the beautiful island off the main coast to see picturesque beaches. We ate octopus at the Stone Town night market, visited spice farms and ruins, and finally went to Arusha, which is the "Geneva of Africa" and home to the East African Community and the UN tribal court for crimes against humanity used for the Rwandan genocide. During this last trip, we were able to also visit Masai villages, see Olduvai Gorge holding some of man's oldest ancestors, and go on a safari in Ngorongoro crater to see some of Tanzania's best wildlife.
 
However, the most fulfilling trip I made was for my internship to Mwanza and the surrounding Lake Victoria region. We went to several meetings with the local office in Mwanza and traveled to some of the clinics where we were educating the population on HIV prevention and performing VMMC treatments. Seeing the hospitals I was mapping and tracking from afar in person was completely surreal. In some regions, the clinics were in established hospitals but others were only in tents or spare rooms on the outskirts of town. There were lines of boys and men waiting to receive treatment everywhere we went. The mothers and wives were also being educated on the benefits of VMMC and other was to prevent the spread of HIV. Being able to contribute to this cause and see the direct benefits our health services had on local communities was both motivating and humbling.
 
It finally began to sink in that my time in Tanzania was coming to an end. It was so hard to say goodbye to all the wonderful people I met during my time there, especially my host family, my family at IntraHealth, my teachers and even the local chapati vendors I chatted with every day. I will forever be grateful for my time in Dar, the connections I made there and how living in Tanzania widened my perspective.