Our greatness comes from what we give: Naeku taught me a lesson

She had nothing but she was willing to give everything. That was Naeku, the woman that I met during my first field trip to the Enjoro Village. That was the spirit of this whole rural Maasai community lost in one of the poorest parts in Tanzania. I had come one month to volunteer for the FAE, having discovered the noble and silent work they were undertaking there to help the most vulnerable children of these underserved communities.

It is hard to make an impact and ending exclusion of children with disabilities in regular schools is a tricky crosscutting challenge that requires tacking it from different fronts; improving school learning infrastructure, building teachers and families capacities, providing assistive learning devices and creating awareness and advocacy. The organization is focusing on these areas and I was there to help them with the communication and outreach strategy. I was supposed to share my skills. We ended up sharing our lives. I learnt much more from that experience, from FAE, from schools and communities than what I expected and what was planned. Give and you will receive. A thousand times more. That is so true. I lived it and felt it. In my soul, flesh and heart.

I had already been a couple of times to Africa, last time also for a volunteering assignment in Nairobi, Kenya. I had already been travelling a few times around, in Rwanda, Congo and the Tanzanian coast. Each time, I always felt something deep, beyond words, that I couldn’t still explain for this monstrous continent, full of beauties and ancestral secrets, hidden sunsets and starry impenetrable skies, so widely misunderstood by our so called modern developed and fast paced western societies.

That day there, in rural Tanzania, in the Enjoro Primary School, I firsthand witnessed the dilapidated and inadequate infrastructures children including those with disabilities had to cope with every day. School buildings are falling apart. Nearly 200 children have just enrolled in the kindergarten and have no classroom to study in. They are learning sitting under trees to escape from the burning sun of this deserted landscape. Rain season will start in one month. Where will these children go? No school for them anymore until Mother Nature will be clement again. Can this still exist in the 21^st century? Where had I been living all these years? Reality is a harsh slap in your face sometimes and I felt ashamed.

That day, during my visit with my director, Samwel, I was freezing in a terribly and unexpectedly harsh weather, having come totally unprepared. As I was trembling in the cold wind of the hills, lost in Swahili translation, Naeku gave me her only scarf. She simply unwrapped this piece of blue bright scarf that she was proudly wearing on her head and put it on my shoulders. I couldn’t understand her words. But her eyes were talking. ‘Asante’…Thank you…What else can you say? What else can you do? No real clue…

I left her one of my earrings. That day I had nothing. That day, like every day of her life, she had nothing. But she gave. What she had, what she could. A scarf, a smile. And we were gone. That was it. And that was All.

We should never forget. We should all donate like Naeku did, without any thoughts, to help make a difference in other people’s lives

We should all act Together, or at least try, as Together, we can transform Lives.

By Agustina

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