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MARK LYDON
Creating a Health Library in Tanzania

By Alia Santini
This article was printed in Abroad View magazine fall 2004

Mark Lydon, a graduate student at the School for International Training (SIT), is inspired by the words of Lilla Watson, an Australian Aboriginal activist and artist. She said, “If you’ve come here to help me, you’re wasting your time. But if you’ve come here because your liberation is bound up in mine, then let us work together.”

Mark attended Creighton University in Omaha, NE, where his first encounter with study abroad was a six-week summer French immersion in Quebec City. As a chemistry major with a concentration in French, Mark combined his interests by joining the Peace Corps after college. When asked why he chose Africa, Mark said, “I wanted to challenge my understanding of the world outside of the U.S. context and [Africa] seemed like the perfect place to do that.”

Mark was assigned to a small village southwest of Arusha, where he taught chemistry and physics in a local secondary school. While there, he befriended the staff of Mwangaza kwa Wenye Ulemavu (Swahili for “Beacon for the Disabled”), where he worked after his Peace Corps stint. This non-profit corporation has identified several diseases and other conditions in rural Tanzania that cause disabilities. Most of the disabilities are preventable, but people often believe they are caused by witchcraft, God’s will or bad luck. The organization’s founder, Paula Gremley, uses the traditional teaching method of storytelling to convey the importance of preventative measures, such as water sanitation, in monthly health education seminars in primary schools.

“Contaminated water and access to adequate nutrition are problems that need to be addressed at many levels,” said Mark, who attributes the poor health to both fluoride-contaminated water and unfavorable governmental polices toward once nomadic peoples. “It’s a tricky situation. For decades, the government of Tanzania has been attempting to bring schools and health dispensaries to the more remote areas. Efforts to nucleate settlements, however, had the side effect of negatively altering once healthy diets.”

Mwangaza, Inc. also arranges for medical treatment, therapy, equipment and prosthetic limbs. The organization functions as an important resource by encouraging the disabled to become advocates within their communities.

Knowing that the students had little access to any kind of library, when Mark returned home, he solicited funding from his local community to help provide the schools with bookshelves, books and additional resources for the educational outreach program.

In his SIT coursework for a degree in international education, Mark is currently addressing the challenges of short-term study abroad programs in terms of local community involvement. When asked what tips he has for students who are thinking about combining volunteer work with study abroad, Mark offers the following advice: “Use your intuition. Be careful about supporting dependency; you want to question the sustainability of your project. Know that nearly all U.S. students have more to gain and learn than we can give or teach to our host country contacts.”

In the coming years, Mwangaza, Inc. hopes to seek out and support other grassroots projects. Mark’s fundraising efforts will provide health education libraries for seven primary schools, but this is just the beginning. The organization would like to see the health libraries expand to books on other subjects in the future. AV

Alia Santini graduated from Brown University and was a master’s degree candidate in international education at the School for International Training when she wrote this article. She was an intern for Abroad View from April-August 2004 and currently works as a global human resources specialist at AXA Global Services in California.