Midd Student in Action

July 01, 2008

Rowan Braybrook ‘09 talks about her work this summer at an NGO in Senegal

The Organization: Tostan's mission is to empower African communities to bring about sustainable development and positive social transformation based on respect for human rights. Since 1991 Tostan has brought its holistic 30-month education program to thousands of communities in nine African countries.

The Work: "I'm doing research on social networking and how it ties into to social changes such as villages' decisions to declare female genital cutting abandonment, and how Tostan's human rights education plays into those decisions. I'm also using the same information and interviews to do a side project, gathering information for a documentary filmmaker from Sierra Leone who is exploring the process of how social change is spread through people and villages. For both projects, I'm attempting to follow the people who benefited from Tostan's educational program from the initial stages, through involvement and abandonment, and finally to the spread of information to others in their social networks. Working here has come with hiccups--mostly in the form of electricity, water, and internet outages, plus the challenges of working in a trilingual environment (English, French, and Wolof, plus additional village languages)--but it's rewarding and I'm learning a lot about how NGOs function."

The Photo: The picture is of me working in the village of Ker Simbara, recording an interpreter’s version of an imam's response to my interview questions.

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