Life in Africa: Learning to be Happy from a Boy with Flip-Flops
Life in Africa: learning to be happy from a boy with flip-flops
Life in Africa: learning to be happy from a boy with flip-flops
BY: ELLEN SCHUR BROWN Editor, Family Section
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| This boy had no shoes, until Doni Robinson gave him a (precious to him) pair of flip-flops. |
Making whitewash out of lime. Building cinderblock walls. Sewing bags in a textile factory. Picking cotton. Feeding babies at a group home. Selling mosquito nets for $1. Cleaning a school infested with bats.
These are just some of the odd jobs Doni Robinson has taken on in small, remote villages in Malawi, Africa.
How does she explain to villagers that her real job this summer is a lifeguard at the Beachwood pool in Cleveland?
“They don’t know what a swimming pool is,” she says, noting that hippopotamuses and crocodiles live in the nearby river, so swimming isn’t exactly a recreational pastime.
Doni visited the southeast African country for her Senior Project Trip, sponsored by the Pepper Pike-based HELP Malawi (helpmalawichildren.org), founded by Jillian Wolstein. Three senior girls from St. Martin De Porres, a Cleveland charter school, joined Doni on the trip, visiting some of the educational, health and economic projects co-sponsored by HELP Malawi. Over three weeks, Doni served as an ambassador for the charity; in the process, she learned to see the world in a whole new way.
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| Acting as an ambassador for the local charity HELP Malawi for her senior project, Robinson learned to do odd jobs and to see the world in a whole new way. |
“I could have worked at a design firm downtown, but I wanted to do something cool,” says the recent Beachwood High School graduate.
The daughter of Heidi DuBois Robinson of Beachwood and Gregg Robinson of Richmond Heights visited traditional African villages, where she slept on the floor, ate without the benefit of silverware, danced provocatively at a puberty initiation ceremony, and learned to function without indoor plumbing. She didn’t cook much. The “kitchen” was three bricks.
Many adults spoke English, so there was usually someone to translate. The children would run first to the African-American girl traveling with Doni from Cleveland, assuming she would understand their language. “They didn’t know there are black people in America,” said Doni.
The mission’s first stop was a children’s group home (“They don’t call it an orphanage”) that raises motherless babies and toddlers. When the youngsters reach age 5, family members will reclaim them. “At first I thought these are terrible conditions.” But once she saw more of the interior of Africa, she learned about real deprivation.
In addition to participating in village life, Doni learned the difference between tragic and trivial.
“It’s uncommon to have your whole (nuclear) family alive,” she said, noting that life expectancy is 35, and everything from the flu to AIDS can be fatal.
She has less patience now for suburban teens’ typical concerns, which involve coveting material possessions. “Here, status is defined by your car,” she says. In Malawi, status is having shoes. One boy cut his bare foot playing soccer. She bandaged the wound and gave him a pair of inexpensive flip-flops. “It was like I gave him a car. I could tell what it meant to him.
“You might complain if your shower is cold, but I saw people who walked miles to get water,” says Doni. She was also struck by the love and caring the children showed for each other. “There was one ball (for all the children to share), but I never saw anyone get in a fight” over it.
The Malawi children have nothing, “yet they act like they don’t have anything to be sad about,” marvels Doni. “Now I know that I can be happy.”
Doni Robinson heads to Rochester Institute of Technology, majoring in new media publishing and international relations, in the fall.
