Robert Simmons, M.A. Candidate, Class of 2017

Robert Simmons, a Master's candidate in International Relations and Diplomacy at AGS, completed a two-month internship in Tanzania, working with a local NGO supporting homeless children and orphans. Simmons came to AGS with a Bachelor's in English and History from Rutgers University, and a Master's in Social Justice Education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a strong desire to devote his future career to the African diaspora at the intersection of education, social justice and intenrational politics. He shares his internship experience and explains how his internship and the AGS program have each helped him make the most of the other.

"This summer I had the opportunity to intern with Kwetu Faraja, an NGO located in Kahunda, Tanzania, Africa. Kwetu Faraja houses about twenty-five homeless or family-less boys currently between the ages 6-23. Kwetu Faraja is a village organization that incorporates a street recruitment to bring boys into their community. Essentially, the process involves going to the streets of the city of Mwanza to search for “street children,” where in our interactions with them we would feed them and talk about their immediate needs and future goals. Many of them see the streets as their only option but many of them also desire to become entrepreneurs, engineers and doctors. Kwetu Faraja invites them to live on their campus, where they become a part of a community and are sponsored (by donations) to attend school.

My title was “Recreational Director.” My responsibilities included interacting with the guys by playing games, tutoring (math and English), learning Swahili, and participating in some of the major day-to-day work of the organization. My hosts wanted me to learn their stories and to share mine. The hope was that the extra supplement will help some of them catch up to the students in their classes, but also that the boys would see, for the first time, a person who looked like them doing well academically. I also spent time researching national and international opportunities for the boys for after they've finished their studies. There are very little options here for them. The job sector in Tanzania caters to an older population and still there aren't many job options. The futures of these youth, and many others, either dim into the darkness of selling oranges or cigarettes on the streets, being flat out homeless, seeking illegal means of work, or (for the lucky small few) leave for the UK or India to never return (what I hear is called "Africa's brain drain").

My first year at AGS has indeed complicated and complemented this experience. At first, I was invited to participate as the summer’s Recreational Director because of my participation in the AGS M.A. program. The organization felt that I had a knowledge base that I could use in understanding the many dynamics that I would encounter. Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa was a phenomenal class (Yates) in which we were required to learn the names of African countries and much of the colonial and political histories of many African countries. The knowledge of how certain countries were colonized and the super important neocolonial analysis discussed frequently in this course helped me make sense of the conditions of Tanzania’s politics and communities. Supplementing that knowledge with theoretical lenses, the Theories course (Anand) helped me think in a variety of ways on the knowledge about states and politics, people and identities, and development and economics that I was receiving. There were questions that arose about the needs of the people in many discussions I had with my hosts and some of their friends- some solutions were coming from a realist analysis of Tanzania’s situation while others were liberal. The Principle of Economics and International Law courses helped ground my ideas around solutions for the community I worked for but also when I was asked about what Tanzania could do. Knowing a little more about how international laws and how laws of economics worked made the difference in my being able to analyze the socio-economic decisions that could be made to improve Tanzania’s economic and political systems.

The experiences of this internship have also impacted the course of my degree. I have a clearer understanding of what I would like to do with my thesis but I have also come across more questions about what to do post-AGS. I left Tanzania more confused about the link between academic discourses on the African continent and the practice of doing work in African countries. Lastly, I learned that we get a chance to talk about organizations that impact change but speak minimally about the organizing of people at the social level, which I had a chance to experience while I was in Tanzania.

Conjointly, this degree program as well as my time in Tanzania has provided me with a world class experience. I have a better grasp on concepts we learned in class, thanks to the work I did a Kwetu Faraja. Also, I had a great time and a time full of conscious experiences in Tanzania, thanks to the support that the AGS classes have provided."

Robert Simmons has also shared some of his pictures with us: