A student's perspective

I traveled to Tanzania with the 2016 PDW group from ISZL. There are many things that could be said about the trip, but mainly that it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. While this was an unforgettable trip, there are of course ethical questions that can be asked while considering such a travel. We raise money to donate to the project, but some of that money is put into airplane tickets in order for us to fly there. Wouldn’t it be better to just donate all the money to the cause and not fly there, giving the people we support in Tanzania more resources? Ultimately, what makes the trip worth it is the students’ personal development, which on the long run could have a bigger positive impact.

In Tanzania, we met a teenager called Mnubi, he is about the same age as most of the students that were on the trip. Mnubi is currently in high school, and through sponsoring by Mr. Huber, he is on his way to university studies. What shook me the most when I talked to him was that he had, before our visit to Arusha, never left his home town of Moshi. In contrast, kids from the ISZL high school have already seen many parts of the world without really thinking about what people their age in different parts of the world have experienced.

In Tanzania we also had the wonderful opportunity to visit a local village of the Maasai tribe, far away from Facebook and Co. There was no way to connect to anything else except the other people that were around me, which put the focus on the direct surrounding rather than everything that we access on the internet on a daily basis. Suddenly, I didn’t get notifications about a new Trump scandal and there were no more meaningless BuzzFeed quizzes. It was just the students from ISZL, the Maasai and the nature surrounding us, and it felt really good.

Our last stop during the PDW was a safari in the Ngorongoro national park, which amazed me more than anything I had ever seen before. Seeing animals in their natural habitat is infinitely more meaningful than seeing them in a cage in a zoo, in my opinion. The elephants, giraffes, zebras and lions were stunning and it is clearly something I will never forget.