Straight from Africa: Alumna volunteers with IEFT in Tanzania
In the past few months, the world has been struck with an ebola panic, stemming from the outbreak of cases in Western Africa. Stories and and photographs have gone viral, ranging from a woman dressed in hazmat suit in the terminal of a Dallas airport to schools being shut down due to the chance that a teacher might have flown on the same plane as a patient of ebola. But the ebola panic has not scared off everyone.
Cassie Kobrin, a 2009 NPHS alumnus, is currently in Tanzania, a country on the west coast of Africa. After graduating from University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Kobrin worked at a public relations firm in San Diego before her wanderlust kicked in.
“During my third year at UCSD I studied abroad in Cape Town, South Africa, then declared an African Studies minor when I returned to UCSD,” Kobrin said. When a friend put her in touch with a non-profit organization called Indigenous Education Foundation of Tanzania who were looking for a communications coordinator, Kobrin jumped at the chance and has been in Tanzania since June.
The Indigenous Education Foundation of Tanzania (IEFT) is an organization that runs Orkeeswa School, a secondary school (high school) for children in Maasai village, in northwest Tanzania. “In Tanzania the average secondary school (high school) costs five hundred dollars but the average Tanzanian family makes just four hundred dollars, and this amount is much lower in the area where our school is located,” Kobrin said.
In fact, according to the IEFT website, most students come from families who make an average of one dollar per day.
This wide gap has only allowed 10 percent of Tanzanian youth to go to high school. IEFT provides underprivileged children with a free, high quality education as well as teaching them life skills, such as entrepreneurship.
As a communications coordinator, Kobrin oversees social media, public relations, marketing, newsletters, sponsorship coordinating, and photography for the organization and the school. She also recently started running the student newspaper.
For Kobrin, the ebola outbreak has not been a main concern of her experience. “People forget exactly how large of a continent Africa is,” Kobrin said. “Ebola is still thousands of miles from me. The distance from me to the outbreak is farther than it is from Newbury Park to New York City,” adding that she receives safety alerts and updates.
Kobrin noted her surprise at the way the Ebola cases in the United States were handled. “I recently traveled to Kigali, Rwanda and there were Ebola checkpoints entering Rwanda and then again when I came back to Tanzania where they took my temperature and made me fill out a form detailing everywhere I’d been in the past few weeks,” Kobrin said.
“I’ve found that African people don’t travel nearly as much as us Westerners do. It’s more likely that someone from the U.S. go to vacation in Guinea than someone from Tanzania going on vacation there.”