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February 2008 | Home
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How to date women – 1943
In 1943 the world was on fire. The campus, too, burned with change — while a little booklet taught students the genteel manners of courtship.
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Students
"You realize, 'Wait, I can do this'"
U-M undergraduates in Africa and around the world
February 24, 2008
U-M Public Health student Renee Pitter's trips to South Africa transformed her life
Renee Pitter and a University of Michigan classmate were several days into a HIV education session in Johannesburg, South Africa, when they got to the part of their program that emphasized faithfulness.
Being faithful, they pointed out to their "students" – school and community leaders being trained to teach others – also means being faithful to yourself. It means deciding, first and foremost, what you're willing to do and what you're not willing to do.
That's when a woman in their group put the lesson into sharp perspective.
"She told us about the day when she finally told her husband he couldn't beat her anymore," Pitter said "She was in a two-income family and she essentially told her husband to leave because she didn't want be beat on anymore. It created a lot of uncertainty for her, but she did it.
"There are so many things I can only read about in a book that other people learn because they live them. There's this divide between the educated and the uneducated, but just because you learn it in a university doesn't mean it's worth more. It really showed me how equal we all are."
GIEU projects are among many U-M programs in Africa projects that have paved the way for a visit by a U-M delegation led by president Mary Sue Coleman
Pitter's experience was part of a U-M Global Intercultural Exchange for Undergraduates (GIEU) trip, a program - affiliated with the National Center for Institutional Diversity - that immerses small groups of U-M students from a wide range of disciplines in month-long cultural experiences around the world—from Ghana to India to inner-city Detroit. One of the trainees calculated the educational ripple effect of this particular project reached 4,000 South Africans.
But international programs like GIEU are not one-way. They reshape the lives of U-M students and faculty as well as their counterparts in other countries. Back on campus, the ripple continues.
"These experiences are huge," Pitter said. "I think for anybody to call themselves educated, this is necessary. You need to have a perspective from somebody else and to be in a situation that's different from your own – a situation that might be a little uncomfortable."
Every GIEU project provides a service of some kind and that creates goodwill and good connections for U-M. Projects in South Africa and Ghana are among many U-M programs that have paved the way for a visit this month by a U-M delegation that will include university President Mary Sue Coleman. But the GIEU program itself teaches intercultural skills, explains A.T. Miller, coordinator of multicultural teaching and director of GIEU. Students don't get to choose their site, and faculty don't get to choose their students, so you may end up with a medical engineering professor running a project with business, history, geology and music students.
"We want our faculty to learn how to teach this way and manage a broad range of students," Miller said. "We also emphasize having a very diverse group of students doing the projects, so they're getting intercultural skills with each other as well the folks in the field."
That much is by design. But students are also together in a foreign culture during what's often a very introspective time. The power of that shared experience holds these groups together long after they've returned to campus.
"We call each other brother and sister," said Pitter, who's still in touch with people from her previous trips, including some who've moved out of state. "If you need anything, you know you can count on them… The trip is very long and very intense. It's so emotional, and HIV is something that anybody is vulnerable to, so you think about it a lot and you're around these people when you're reflecting on your own behavior."
Pitter, now a graduate student in the U-M School of Public Health, was interested in law before she took a GIEU trip to Jamaica in 2005. As she would later do in South Africa, Pitter and her colleagues taught people who would be responsible for teaching others about HIV awareness using a verbal method designed to reach illiterate and low-literate communities. Led by Literature Science and the Arts lecturer Nesha Haniff, they emphasized prevention and acceptance, and Pitter says the work was often more about empowering people than teaching them.
"It's when you realize, 'Wait, I can do this,' and that light bulb goes off." Pitter said. "Everything that you do starts with the attitude that you can do it."
That applied just as much – if not more - to the U-M students as it did to the people they were training.
"We didn't realize we were becoming a pretty significant leadership program, but these students come back and they've developed a network of extremely varied people across campus, and they end up becoming campus leaders," Miller said.
GIEU sends groups worldwide, and has had a presence in Africa since the program launched in 2002. It's sponsored seven trips to Ghana, three to South Africa and others to Senegal, East Africa, Kenya and Tanzania. The project tends to dictate the location. Haniff, who's led seven trips to South Africa under various programs, chose the country because it has the highest rate of HIV infection in the world.
Through GIEU, one U-M group worked with the state-run hospital system in Ghana to create a system for rehabilitating people with disabilities – something the country doesn't have yet, but may eventually because of this project. Another group studied African drumming in Ghana. When the students – not a music major among them - came back they formed an ensemble, called Bronyi Ghana ("Bronyi" meaning "foreigners") that performs to raise money to send Ghanaian girls to school. Every $300 they raise pays for 10 years of schooling.
"A lot of times Americans go overseas and give the rest of the country a bad rap," Pitter said. "We had people who were shocked, who said, "You're Americans? You're so nice to us.' I think the experience causes you to be a better citizen when you come home – and a better citizen of the world."