My AIESEC experience in Kenya
I was a teacher
at a slum school in southern Nairobi for about 7 weeks, working through AIESEC
in JKUAT. Without exaggeration, the experience was probably the best in my
life, for many reasons. The first being it threw me so far out of my comfort
zone that I needed to rethink my own world view, re-evaluate and create a new
one. Walking into, and working in a slum is something I have never experienced
before, therefore my own mind and body did not know what to expect, nor how to
react to the situation; the slum is cramped, dirty, filled with substandard
housing as you’d expect, and most importantly is the feeling of not belonging
and being an outsider to the situation. One biggest learning experience I
gained was observing my own self reacting and adapting to the new situation.
Teaching the
students melted me both inside and outside. Seeing the joy [as a result of our
presence as interns] in both the baby classes and the older classes gave me
some perspective; what this experience meant to me meant even more to the kids that I was teaching, and the school that I
helped run. The students are highly intelligent, the kids (baby class) are full
of energy emanating a spark of light that I haven’t seen anywhere else, or in
anyone else. Seeing and experiencing such things makes you drop inhibitions in
life and rethink your own perspective and position in the world. Not only does
it make you open your mind significantly, but you realize that you can only
really change a small portion of the world around you, but what you finally do
change, is an extremely impressionable, lifelong change on both who you change
and yourself.
Nikhil Narayanan
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