Tanzania Volunteer Teaching Trip | A Girls’ Night That Meant More Than I Expected
On my second day in Tanzania, I officially began my volunteer placement. For the first time, I stepped into a local primary school in Arusha as a volunteer teacher. After a spending the whole morning in the classroom, we returned to our dormitory in the afternoon, buzzing with stories as everyone shared their experiences from different projects.
If you haven’t read the earlier parts yet, you can catch up here:
→ Travelling from Hong Kong to Arusha (IVHQ Experience)
→ The Three Rafikis
→ My First Day as Teacher
When Enthusiasm Meets Reality
Everyone was eager to talk about their day. But I noticed my roommate, an Indian girl, looked visibly unsettled.
She felt she hadn’t been able to make full use of her professional teaching skills. She was heartbroken by how limited the students’ resources were and regretted not bringing more supplies with her. She told us that back home in Australia she would casually throw away pens, but here every single pencil was treasured. You could hear the frustration in her voice.
We gently reminded ourselves that change takes time. We could only take things one step at a time and not expect a few short weeks here to transform everything.
The Canadian girl returned from her placement looking pale and shaken. She had been assigned to medical project and had spent the morning in a local hospital watching a doctor perform an abortion.
The facilities were extremely basic. Several white buckets of chloride solution stood on the floor, the operating bed was old and worn, and there was no proper pain relief. The doctor even took phone calls while carrying out the procedure.
Seeing how unsettled she was, we all felt concerned. One of the education volunteers said softly, 'In teaching there is room for mistakes and imperfection, but in hospitals lives are at stake. I can only imagine how powerless she must have felt as a nurse.”
Finding Ourselves in Africa
People from completely different backgrounds, who had never met before, came together because of a shared desire to volunteer and a curiosity about the unknown. The two Dutch girls were in their early twenties and teaching in Africa for the first time.
I have always preferred evenings like this over some crazy parties. There is something special about sitting together, listening to strangers’ stories and sharing your own without any pressure. We all knew we were just passerbys in each other’s lives, so we could speak freely, without judgment, knowing we might never meet again.
So many feelings we usually keep tucked away, even from our closest friends, can be shared more easily in moments like these. People’s impressions of me back home are often fixed: how picky I was at work, how funny I was at university, how nerdy I was at high school. Only when you step away from everything familiar, when no one knows your old story, can you begin to discover other sides of yourself.
This is one of the reasons I love solo travel so much. The journey outward is often a path inward. Being forced to think and speak in English, away from my native language, allows me to experience life through a different version of myself. It is both strange and wonderfully freeing.
A Girls’ Night to Remember
Another girl from Australia had already been here for two or three weeks and was leaving at the weekend. We decided to give her a proper farewell with a happy Friday dinner at Blue Heron Restaurant.
We started by inviting two Italian girls we had met earlier. They brought two Dutch girls, who in turn invited a Chinese girl from Xi’an. What began as a small gathering of seven quickly grew to ten. We all squeezed into one private car, laughing at how ridiculous yet fun the whole situation was.
That light-hearted energy helped everyone release some of the heavier feelings from the morning. The restaurant was beautiful, with views over Mount Meru, Tanzania’s second-highest peak. As the sun set, the sky turned a soft golden hue, and later we could even see faint stars twinkling above.
