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Community Corner

British School of Boston Students Work at Tanzanian School

BOSTON-- A clean whiteboard and working markers; plenty of paper, pens and technology; and teachers who are not only well-trained, but dedicated to ensuring each student receives the best education possible.

For students at the British School of Boston, this type of learning environment is often taken for granted. But for one group of five middle and high school students from the Jamaica Plain independent school, that’s no longer the case.

The students traveled to Tanzania earlier this month for a week of community service at a primary school in the country’s Arusha region. The condition of the school, students said, was unlike anything they’d seen in the United States.

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“It was very welcoming, but then I started to notice all the little details,” said BSB eighth grader Stephanie Luiz. “The buildings look really nice at first...But if you look closer you can see the bars on the windows, and that they’re rusty, and you can see the dust all over the floors, and the cracks in the chalkboards.”

The BSB students- Luiz, Tomas Navarro, Katie Malone, Maya Nijhoff Asser and Rick Boer- and teacher Ruth Williams joined more than 100 other students from Nord Anglia Education schools in the African country earlier in February, to identify and kick-off a series of service projects to improve daily life for the region’s residents.

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Nord Anglia Education (NAE) is a Hong Kong-based educational network of 27 schools around the world, with which the British School of Boston joined last spring. The service trip to Tanzania was an initiative of NAE’s Global Classroom, an online learning community that works to provide international collaboration between students and opportunities for learning outside the classroom.

For the students selected to attend the trip this year, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience a foreign culture, meet students from around the world and make a difference for others in need.

And though students returned to Boston on February 10, for many, their hearts are still in Africa.

“It changed my perspective in terms of my needs and my wants, but also in terms of what all of our attitudes should be toward the things that we have,” said Navarro. “If we don’t get something that is expensive, that we don’t even need, lots of us may get unhappy.

“But people there, they survive on what they have and they’re extremely happy to have it.”

BSB students prepared for the trip to Tanzania for months, raising nearly $5,000 to help fund projects at an African primary school, from the installation of new windows to updated electrical wiring.

And while the students spent a few days on safari and learning more about the local culture, much of their time was spent at the school, painting classrooms and student dormitories, fixing cracked chalkboards and even helping students and teachers improve learning at the school.

Students had seen pictures of the school before arriving for community service work, but the condition of the classrooms and the rooms that housed student boarders, were shocking.

About 120 students live at the school full-time, often sleeping three to a bed. The kitchen, which feeds the entire school, is open to the outside, using grills and hot stones to cook dozens of meals each day.

But after a week of work by BSB students and the students from other Nord Anglia Education schools, the school was cleaner and brighter, students said. The students and teachers who live and work there, they said, were incredibly grateful.

And as students at BSB and other Nord Anglia Education schools move forward with their community service work in Tanzania- identifying projects to continue in future years and continuing fundraising efforts, it is this gratitude, they said, that will stay with them and that has already helped bring new perspective to their own lives.

“There are things that you kind of take for granted,” said Malone. “Then you think back to what you saw there and it’s like, ‘Wow.’ We have so much...We’re so lucky here.”

The British School of Boston uses rigorous international curricula to educate students from toddlerhood through high school at its 40-acre Jamaica Plain site, culminating in the highly sought-after International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IB Diploma).

The school attracts students from around Greater Boston and from more than 70 countries around the globe. BSB’s individualized and international approach to education celebrates students’ unique backgrounds, encourages individual strengths, sets personalized goals and involves students in the learning process.

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