SSIG
From StudentOrganization
July 1-8, 2008
Breman Asikuma, Ghana
Participants (from left to right, top to bottom): Khaled Ziyaeen, Saleh Al Khulaifi, Omar Alouba, Omar El Zoheery, Basheera Banu, Maha Mahmood, Bayan Taha, Dana Hadan.
Chaperones: Dave Stanfield and Darbi Roberts
Few words can describe their experience in Ghana. It will go down in the history of CMUQ as one of the most memorable, life-changing trips these 10 people took. Below is an article written on the trip which narrowly sums up what we did and learned. Also for viewing pleasure are pictures, but none of these still do justice to the experience...
The scene at the Doha airport was the same as usual. Long, messy queues at the check-in desks. A large group waiting at the designated “meeting point” just inside the initial security check made up of travelers, friends, and families coming to say goodbye. Last minute overweight baggage drama. Student Affairs has taken plenty of trips before with students, but this one, we soon found out, would raise the bar far beyond our expectations.
On June 30th, 8 students – Saleh Al Khulaifi, Omar Alouba, Basheera Banu, Omar El Zoheery, Dana Hadan, Maha Mahmoud, Bayan Taha, and Khaled Ziyaeen – and 2 chaperones – Darbi Roberts and Dave Stanfield – got on a plane headed for Accra, Ghana with the intention of building houses through Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village program. Few of us had ever done work with Habitat and few of us had ever been to Africa outside of Egypt, so the anticipation was infectiously overwhelming. What would the people be like? What would the food taste like? How hard would the work actually be? The few answers we had were based on books, Habitat documents, and a conversation with a Carnegie Mellon home campus student who grew up in Accra. However, nothing could prepare us for a labor intensive building schedule in the small rural village of Breman Asikuma. We made bricks. We carried the bricks. We made load after load of mortar for the bricks. Four hours in the morning, break for lunch, and another four hours in the afternoon. That was how we spent most of our time in Ghana, but the trip wasn’t just about building houses. It was about learning from others, for which each student had a different and very personal experience.
For sophomore Saleh Al-Khulaifi, it was the experience of living like the locals that changed his perspective. The entire week we stayed in the houses of Habitat home owners, built by Habitat volunteers in the past. The students shared close quarters, 4 people to a room with simple bunk-beds for sleeping, and used a bathroom that had no running water. Saleh reflected, “How come are they happy with this simple life?” The more the week wore on, the more we saw just how happy the simple life can be – and learned to appreciate that.
For some students, interacting with the local community members was most impactful. During work breaks they played football with the local kids and played board games with them at night. This experience made senior Basheera Banu feel not just welcomed into the community, but as if she wasn’t a stranger or outsider at all. Being able to travel thousands of miles and interact with people from a completely different culture than your own – or different from any you’ve ever even experienced before – has an incredible way of connecting us to others. Basheera reflected, “It doesn’t matter where you’re from, what your religion is. It’s just humanity.”
For other students, like sophomore Khaled Ziyaeen, simply seeing others less fortunate than him led to self-reflection. “It made me ask ‘who am I, who do I want to be, and how do I get there?’ It made me appreciate more around me. It’s important to know that no matter what situation you’re in, there’s always someone who is worse of than I am, and they’re not complaining about it.” Even for those who have seen homelessness or worked with Habitat before, living a life of privilege in both Qatar and Pittsburgh causes us to be disconnected from the world around us. We live in an educational bubble, blind to the problems that over half the world’s population deals with as a result of poverty or lack of access to things we consider “essentials.”
Senior Maha Mahmoud’s experience centered around what she learned from the Ghanaians themselves. Throughout the week, we had a chance to meet people from all walks of life – college students in Accra, Habitat staff members, shop owners in the markets of Breman Asikuma, and children in the Habitat housing development where we stayed. One of the most striking commonalities was the extent to which a sense of spirituality infiltrated every aspect of their lives. They lived out their faith in how they treated others fairly, in their thankfulness, in their hospitality, humility, and generosity. It wasn’t about what religion they practiced, but how they practiced that religion in every aspect of their life. At the end of the trip, Maha summed it up for all of us, “They made me feel like I could be better.”
The beauty of our experiences in Ghana was that everybody came away with a different lesson or a different insight which has significantly impacted their life, their perspective, and their character. What was originally a trip to build houses for others was ultimately a trip to build our identity as global citizens.
Habitat for Humanity is an international not-for-profit organization whose primary mission is to provide affordable, standardized housing for those who are currently living in sub-standard housing conditions. Habitat does not give handouts. Rather, houses are built through a combined effort of volunteers dedicating their time and the future home-owner’s sweat equity, the organization’s philosophy which requires that all future home-owners put in a certain number of hours of work on their own house.
