Student trip to Tanzania leads to a new way of life

Sydney Schaef with friends in Tanzania “Some experiences change the way you live your life… the way you view the world.” That’s how Sydney Schaef describes her opportunity to study abroad in 2006, as part of her undergraduate degree program at the University of Florida.

Preparing to be a teacher at the time, Sydney traveled to Tanzania as a student volunteer with an interest in learning what education is like in developing countries. Since then, her life has never been the same.

Today she’s the founder and president of Kujali International, a nonprofit organization based in the United States and operating in Tanzania. Committed to caring for some of the world’s most vulnerable youth, the organization educates and equips these students with the tools, resources and opportunities necessary to overcome the cycle of poverty in their lives.

To accomplish these goals, Ms. Schaef, in cooperation with other community-based organizations in the region, has created a non-traditional boarding school for children in grades 9-12. The school represents a basic change in the way aid is administered to atrisk children.

“Traditional orphanages give kids a place to live, but no specific training or education for the future; schools provide education, but send kids home to very bad situations in many cases,” she says.

“Kujali is designed to break the cycle that leads to generation after generation of need and misfortune, by providing a solid, preparatory education in a safe and encouraging environment that nurtures the individual’s whole development,” she adds.

Most boarding schools in Tanzania are attended by only the wealthiest students in the region. Ms. Schaef recognized the advantages of turning that tradition on its head and providing a comparable opportunity for those in the most need. The idea came to her after a chance meeting with Hezekia Mwalugaja, the founder and director of HOCET, a community-based organization in Tanzania dedicated to permanently improving the lives of children and other residents.

Ms. Schaef says meeting Mr. Mwalugaja was for her life-changing and fortuitous. “Seeing the positive influence that this one man was having on his community inspired me to want to do something similar in my life, and helped me to see a path to achieve that objective,” she recalls. She adds that one of her organization’s key goals is to give the young people at Kujali the skills to work as agents of change in their own communities so that they will be able to prevent the next generation from encountering similar suffering.

She grew up in Naples with two brothers, Steven and Aaron, and attended Naples Christian Academy for middle school and Baron Collier High School. She had always planned to become a teacher and is currently attending UCLA to earn her master’s in education.

“Right now I am traveling back and forth between California and Tanzania” she says, “but once I graduate at the end of the year, I plan to move to Tanzania full-time.”

She says her academic training has prepared her well for the work she has ahead of her. “My goals haven’t changed, so much as grown to encompass a much broader scope of service,” she explains. “Based on the need that I have seen, I wish to be able to help enrich the life of an entire child — not just academically, but in every way necessary, to help give them a broader range of options for the future.”

Many of the students at Kujali have lived in severely compromised situations. Some were forced to quit school at a young age in order to help support their families; oth- ers have had to steal food just to stay alive. “Watching their lives transform so completely in the surroundings of the school is a very moving experience,” Ms. Schaef says. “It’s like watching the ceiling on their lives bursts open. It’s remarkable the impact that opportunity can have on outlook and behavior.”

Based on the success of the Kujali approach, she hopes to one day be able to replicate the model in other developing regions around the globe, particularly in the Sudan or Nepal. “If it works well in one place, it might just be a good solution in another place as well,” she says.

But Kujali International still needs many resources in order to be able to achieve the full scope of its goals. “We are hoping for donations of cell phones, computers and other technological items,” Ms. Schaef says “Right now the kids are learning about computers by drawing on a chalk board. Many of them have never even seen a real personal computer.

“If we hope to prepare these kids for the future in a legitimate and meaningful way, they are going to need modern tools to help them to remain competitive.”

Though her ambitions are large, she has determination enough to match it. “I believe the Kujali International approach can have a tremendous and lasting impact on the young people of Tanzania and maybe on at-risk youths in other places as well,” she says. “It’s a big goal, but it’s an important one, and I and my partners are determined to succeed.” 

— For more information on how you can help Kujali International, e-mail info@ kujali.org.