Hello from Abuja, Nigeria.

Ah, I see I am the third to post today. Tori. You write extremely effective emails.

Hello everyone, and a special hello to all of our new Scholars! Welcome to Duke! I hope this blog will provide us a means to connect before we meet for some heart-to-heart time at the September retreat.

I’m Jane, and I am a rising senior, currently using my Uni enrichment opportunity to have the summer of a lifetime. I spent the first month in Brazil, filming a documentary with my seven-person team from Students of the World, a 501(c)3 organization. We worked closely with the NGO Citizens for Democracy in Information Technology and documented the work they are doing to bring computer technology and education into the favelas. Millions live in the “slum hills,” so-called “invisible” communities steeped in abject poverty, violence and drug-trafficking. And yet, very little is known about these and similar unplanned urban sectors, spreading through Brazil and throughout the developing world. For more information on our work in Rio, Salvadore and Belem, you can check out blogs, videos and photos on our team’s “live site” at http://www.seechangenow.org/2008/Brazil.

I am spending the last two months of my summer in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, volunteering with the NGO Teachers Without Borders (TWB) to realize the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. It’s been a completely different kind of experience. In Brazil, as the interviewer behind the camera, I was part of collaborative efforts to bring outside, international attention to local crises. In contrast, I have come to Abuja as an individual volunteer and have found that everything rides on personal initiative. Here we launch projects and implement educational reform on the grassroots level, inside out, bottom up. We most recently launched our first Wall-less Classroom, which is a class I teach with another volunteer in the middle of the sprawling dirt expanse that is Jabi Motor Park. I don’t want to risking boring you with details, but if you are interested, you’re free to look up my daily scribblings at whereonearthisjane.blogspot.com. I’ve copied my most recent entry below, in the interest of not cheating and making this a real blog contribution.

I wish you all the best this summer, wherever you are in the world. I would also love to hear from you: let’s connect before it’s over!

Jane C, Trinity ’09

Day 33. 07.23.08. Education is more than literacy.

We finished up late today and waited under the canopy for Mr. Oko to come from the office to pick us up. Amarachi and Ngozi were seated across from me, discussing today’s class –when behind them, a man in maybe his mid-twenties reached out and slapped a woman to the ground. Shocked, I stood there as she lay there, ten yards away, facedown in the dirt, shaking. Three men seated at a table inches –literally, inches –away from the girl, did nothing. They did not move to help her, or turn to ask how she was, or really, give any indication that they had witnessed what had just happened at their feet–or felt happen, from the tremors in their table legs.

All around, people sat around, on makeshift benches, on cars, all watching in that nonchalant way of the accidental, incidental spectator. A full ten seconds or so later, feeling entered my legs and I found myself rushing over; Amarachi realized what was happening and helped me try to get the woman to stand so we could assess the damage –she was sobbing and sobbing –and as I brushed off her arms, covered in that horrible dusty orange dirt, the dirtiest kind of dirt –I had a second shock. This was just a little girl. Though relatively tall, she was so skinny that my hand fit around her forearm. Amarachi began shouting at the man who had struck her, and at this point another man saw fit to come over and join in on chastising this silent man in the blue jersey. We eventually determined that the blue-shirted man hit her because he did not want to pay her the 10 naira he owed her. Ten cents.

The worst part. The man felt bad. I could tell. He did not move or say a word as we dusted the girl off, or when Amarachi issued him a warning, or even when others then began yelling, even jabbing at him. I looked at this man, a little older than me; his unchanging expression, how still he stood through it all, and I knew. He felt bad. It was strange, how horrible this was, this knowledge that he was sorry for what he had done. It would have been easier to digest, maybe, if I thought that he thought he was in the right. But “right” and “wrong” are not such clear things here. You act. You do. And when a foreigner gets into the middle, and then of course others get involved in the muddle, and you are forcibly held accountable for what is daily occurrence here in the Park, and you look at this girl, bleeding and sobbing, clutching thirty crumpled naira…I don’t know. I don’t know how that feels. How confusing, and tumultuous, and bad.

I feel sick writing this, hours later. Education is missing from Jabi Motor Park, and that doesn’t just mean the people who spend all the hours of the day here lack the opportunity to read fancy books and write fancy letters and pursue better salaries. There is a violent undercurrent in the motion of daily Park life, and even at the best of times, it is expressed in a kind of roughness, a brusqueness of the hands and of the feet. I know the beatings cannot be uncommon. Children and women are especially vulnerable. It is not a question of whether they are treated well or badly –they are not treated at all. They are handled.