Lakeside School Partnership
August 23, 2025 / in Programs / by admin
This July, the Twegashe School community was delighted to host a group of eleven high school students from the Global Service Learning Program of Lakeside School in Seattle. CORE Tanzania and Lakeside School launched this important new partnership last year, and the first two years of the relationship have been a resounding success.
Preparation
The Lakeside students experienced daily life in the village through three-week homestays with Twegashe families. Twegashe staff worked in advance with host families to help ensure the visitors would be as safe and healthy as possible while still experiencing ordinary village life. There were trainings for host parents on topics like hygiene, food preparation safety, and “personal space”.
We helped host families prepare the facilities at their homes so the visitors would be comfortable. Last year an initial round of home visits revealed that many of the bathing stalls and outhouses weren’t up to snuff. Renovations ensued, along with a series of follow-up visits to make sure repairs were on schedule. Everyone “passed” the final inspections, and some went above and beyond: For example, a toilet structure with one family toilet stall and a second private stall for the visitor, a foot-operated hand-washing station, a bath stall lined with black plastic for extra privacy, and even a toilet with a holder for toilet paper! None of these are things you would find in an ordinary Bushasha outhouse. These special touches demonstrate the excitement the host families felt about the coming of these visitors.
Twegashe camp
The Lakeside students were engaged with their homestay families on most evenings and weekends (except for one Saturday trip to the market in town). On the weekdays, they worked with Twegashe teachers to lead camp activities for Twegashe students, who have a month-long mid-year break in July. This year the camp was organized into activity stations. Groups of campers rotated between six different stations: geography, sports, drama, science, cooperative games, and art.
Geography station activities included making papier-mâché globes, learning to use a compass, and following a compass course treasure hunt. The compass activity was a challenge – the Lakeside students had to instruct the Twegashe teachers on how to use a compass before they could all start teaching the kids!
At the sports station, Twegashe campers learned new games like capture the flag, kickball, and frisbee.
Each of the drama groups worked on dramatizing a folktale – Three Billy Goats Gruff, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or Jack and the Beanstalk. At the end of the three weeks, they performed their plays for the other campers. The performers (and their directors) did a wonderful job, especially considering that they only had four camp sessions to practice.
Making and racing rubber-band cars was a highlight at the science station. And body tracing was a fun way to learn about the internal organs of the body.
Twegashe campers had a blast with the Lakeside students at the cooperative games station. Here they were working together to flip a mat upside down without any member of their group stepping off the mat. And they made good use of the parachutes that were donated earlier this year by CORE Tanzania friends Bobby McLaughlin and Stacey Solain – Up, down, up, down, up…under!
At the art station, campers learned how to weave on a cardboard loom and they made paper collages. The also learned to make friendship bracelets. We saw lots of bracelets being made outside of camp time, too – gifts to be given as a sign of the wonderful friendships formed during the Lakeside visit.
Intercultural competence
One of the goals of the program from Lakeside’s perspective is for students to gain intercultural competence and increased global awareness, particularly through the homestays. A few excerpts from their writing about the experience demonstrate that this goal was definitely accomplished.
They learned about being accepted…
If you told me I’d feel this comfortable and at home with this random Tanzanian family in only one week I wouldn’t have believed you. On that first day, Johnson seemed like a shy and introverted kid. I couldn’t really get him talking and when I did, it was only short phrases or a couple words here and there. But on the second day, he started to open up…On day four, I asked Johnson if we were going to go back to his house after school that day. He paused for a moment, then corrected me by saying “Our house.” I was speechless.
About how much we all have in common…
On Saturday, I spent most of the morning cooking with my mom, learning how they make chapati and the everyday lunch, consisting of mashed bananas with beans, rice, and either meat or fish. We connected over shared love for cooking and taught each other as we cooked — I feel like, after that morning, I’ll be able to leave knowing I had a much stronger bond with her.
And about how our environment shapes many of our attitudes…
One thing this trip has made me realize is how much the definition of useful and useless can change in different settings…My first experience with this started in the first few days we were here, when we got juice in plastic bottles. After finishing her juice, Nisela gently set hers down on a rock near our house and said, “the people will take it.” I think she did this twice, and both times, the bottle was gone when we passed that spot the next day…And a few days later, we passed a big bottle that seemed pretty nice, and Nisela looked at it and said, “we will take this to our home.” This bottle, a piece of trash to someone, was something my family might find useful.
To supplement what they learned from their homestay families, we scheduled a few organized activities for experiencing the local culture – for example, making mats from grasses and from banana bark, learning how to make a to-go food package from a heat-softened banana leaf wrapped in banana bark, and helping parent volunteers to carry grass for mulching the school garden.
Wonderful memories
The 2024 Lakeside group worked together with Twegashe students to make a beautiful banner representing the new Lakeside-Twegashe relationship. The banner is now prominently displayed in the cafeteria. And this year’s group added a mural to the north wall of building two which will eventually include handprints of every Twegashe student along with those of our Lakeside friends. Adding their handprint to the friendship wall will be a rite of passage for incoming kindergartners. Seeing this artwork on campus every day brings wonderful memories of our Lakeside visitors!
Our hope for the future
In addition to learning all sorts of new things during the camp sessions, Twegashe students got valuable practice using English with native speakers, they had their horizons broadened beyond the confines of the village, and they made some very special new friends. We hope this program will continue for many years to come, so that future Twegashe students, and Lakeside students as well, will benefit from this wonderful opportunity!
