Change Your Mind

My entire life I’ve heard people talk about life-changing experiences. How the first time that they stepped foot on their college campus, their life was changed. How they met someone who changed their life. Or how they moved to a new country and it changed their life. I’ve always wondered what this felt like and wondered if it had happened to me without even realizing. Sure, my life had changed several times. I had moved to different countries, traveled to different continents, started college, experienced losses, and each of those changed my life in small and large ways, but mostly in ways that make sense. I had never experienced the kind of life-changing journey that you read about in books until I went to Tanzania.

I joined Service Without Borders at the very beginning of my first semester at Virginia Tech. I’ve always known that international outreach and working with children were in the cards for me, but I never knew to what extent, and this club seemed perfect to me. When I found out that I would be traveling with the team over the summer, I was ecstatic, but I still did not realize how much of an impact this trip would have on me. We spent two weeks in the village of Engaruka continuing to help improve a school that Service Without Borders helped build last summer. We spent our days constructing new projects, doing necessary upkeep, and building relationships with the students at the school and other members of the community. Our last week, we got to do what many tourists that visit Tanzania do and we went on a safari! We saw more animals than I can count, we slept in tents with hyenas, lions, and buffalo surrounding us – not quite the same as sleeping in Harper Hall on campus!

From the moment we stepped off the plane at the Kilimanjaro airport, I had a sense of peace and happiness that I truly had never experienced. Every single person we met from the customs workers to the children we played with every day at the school changed my world. In three weeks, I learned lessons that I wish I had learned years ago. I learned about the simplicity of life. I learned that happiness has absolutely nothing to do with materialistic things and that life can really be lived day-to-day. I laughed easily, slept wonderfully, and loved so hard. I was the happiest I’ve ever been and when I say it changed my life, I mean it changed my views on how I want to live my life and solidified how I want my future to look. I realized the irony in buying new clothes for a service project, my own vanity that I express every day, and the ethnocentrism that we all have. We stayed in a community filled with poverty, but nothing about it felt poor. These people were happier than most people I know, they worked harder than any of us, and they could teach us more than we could ever teach them. When I say this experience changed my life, I mean I needed it, I needed them, and I cannot wait to go back.