Change your Life, go on exchange.

Hey AIESEC!!!

So, this is directed to those yet to experience exchange. You hear exchange; you try to imagine what is so fantastic about spending your money, leaving your country and going to work for free?! Well, I’m here to tell you what is fantastic about it through reports of people who went on exchange, I shall be doing this regularly from now on. This was my report at the end of my experience. It's a bit long, please be patient.

INTRODUCTION

My name is Mojolaoluwa Keshiro of mechanical engineering at the university of Lagos. Today is 23rd January 2015 and it marks five weeks and 5 days since I got in to AIESEC Legon in Ghana to work on the INSPYA project.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION AND ACTIVITY

First I’ll describe how the project went then I’ll comment on the project itself; my praises, my criticisms and how It helped and affected my life. For the INSPYA project; the description read that we were going to mentor orphaned and emotionally vulnerable kids and motivate them to get on with their life. We were also supposed to have some drop-outs who we would convince to go back to school. I and some colleagues working on different projects in Ghana arrived at the intern house. At the start of the project the Project Director was a bit busy with her exams which was slightly disappointing, but a fellow Exchange Participant on the INSPYA project , Miss Jane Olimni, helped me and my colleagues who arrived by giving us a little orientation into the project and what we would be doing.The next day, after Jane gave us the little orientation, I went to work at Hope-Faith Vangelism Ministries International Orphanage for the first time. When I got there I met the kids and a lot were quite wonderful. They were supposed to be emotionally vulnerable but emotionally difficult to reach children. They were supposed to seem like children who had had something very life-changing in a not good way happen to them. To be sure, they all had something very life-changing happen to them, but you wouldn’t have felt so from the way many of them welcomed us. They didn’t behave like children who something had happen to, they didn’t behave like victims. Rather they behaved like children whose lives were shaped, not affected/disturbed, but shaped by whatever had happened. Most of them were very wonderful, nice and ready to meet us. They were very obviously not new to meeting interns from another country. They even named me Quabena which was the name they gave to males born on Tuesday. We had a “Get to know you session” and after interacting with them I was able to get a feel of each of their level of intellect.

There were a lot of interns and as such each intern had about one or two child to mentor. I had a kid named Francis to myself that day and that day formed the bedrock of a good friendship between me and Francis that lasted throughout the period I went to the orphanage. I met Francis in the orphanage’s library and told him to bring a book relating to what they are treating in school. I came on any two days of the week every week apart from weekends. On any day I came, I spent about two or three hours with Francis and any other kid I happened to work with that day. I usually mostly just taught them, but sometimes if they start to get bored, I could engage them in discussions. I also taught other kids like Jacob, Robert, Little Francis, Bright and Koffa. I met some others like Bruno, Prosper, Taofiq, Jerry, Evans, James and Joshua. On my first encounter with Francis I was pleased to learn that for a child in class two his mathematics was very good even almost close to excellent. His English too was quite adequate and above average, but he gets bored with English too easily. He was a keen mind however and was ready to do anything that would assist him in his dream to become a mechanized Farmer; things like improving on his English. So I made sure to get books that were interesting to him and give them to him to read and write down the hard words. I also promised him he could draw the pictures in the books if he could read a designated amount of pages that day(he loves to draw). He improved a bit over time. After three weeks we had a chance to go to another orphanage for a day. The orphanage was called New Life Orphanage. We had a wonderful time there that day as we had a fun day with the kids. We organized a quiz completion for them. I anchored and enjoyed myself with them. This orphanage had about 60 kids.

During our last week with the children we had quiz competitions also and we had a final video session with the mentees. Each child said his name and gave a little background on themselves and told us what he wanted to be in the future. We had pictures with all of them and exchanged goodbye presents. On the last day as they were all talking, I examined myself and checked if I was different from the person who stepped foot in Ghana five weeks ago. I realized that I now know what it is to take care of someone who I owed absolutely nothing. I got to deal with children and I was able to help somebody and this made me very proud of myself. Nevertheless, I felt fulfilled and was happy I had taken this wonderful opportunity AIESEC offered. I have to comment on the directing of the project though. It wasn’t the best as we weren’t properly oriented by any AIESECer from Legon, until a little over a week later. The accommodation was quite awesome though and I give credit for that.

CONCLUSION

Now, I’m preparing to head back to Nigeria and I look at my experience totally and will like to say I had a wonderful experience of the Ghana culture.  I ate Ghanaian food, dressed Ghanaian, spoke a little of Ghanaian language, spoke with the Ghanaian accent and visited the Ghanaian places. I made a lot of Ghanaian friends and will like to come back to Ghana again to see them.

Now, the entire narration above has pictures to tell the story. Because the above was an official review there were some things I was unable to talk about which I will mention briefly. This internship experience was important to me because I was able to spend my break impacting on the society, developing myself and adding value to my worth in the labor market all at once, instead of blowing it on random stuff. Funny enough, the fun that we naturally have during our breaks, I had multiple in Ghana. I stayed at the intern house and I was living with about twenty others my age (Coed). The house experience was a mini Big Brother Africa. We had parties (my birthday was one of them), a lot of fun times, fight times and make-up times. We had outings and maximum fun and still got to work and add something valuable to our CV! I’ve said enough people, go on exchange. It’ll change your life for good.
Mojolaoluwa Keshiro
Intel manager
AIESEC Lagos.