Center for African Education

Samantha received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship to learn Swahili during the summer of 2010. After taking an intensive Swahili course, she used her stipend to fund a one-month research trip for her IP to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Her data collection goal was to capture the personal narratives of natives because she wanted to find out what relationships and experiences shape daily life in eastern Congo and western Rwanda in order to understand how her  interactions with these stories could be used in development discourse to initiate relevant positive changes.

She started in Kigali, Rwanda, where she stayed at a local guesthouse owned by an American man and his family. Samantha took the bus to Goma, DRC where she traversed the volcanic-rock-ridden “streets” that resembled mountain passes rather than roads to interview school teachers, domestic servants and children selling peanuts at the port. She then talked with a group of boys who made their living doing freelance photography for special occasions and girls selling corn. She also walked inside homes of displaced people from the recent civil war to see their suffering and hear their voices. During a day trip to the small village of Kitchanga with the head of a Congolese NGO, Samantha interviewed the Mayor about the major problems and solutions to development in his area. In the beginning weeks of August, Samantha took a 7-hour ferry ride on Lake Kivu from Goma to Bukavu, where she toured the city and met UN troops.

Samantha continued 15 minutes over the border to Kamembe in Cyangugu, Rwanda where she stayed with her Swahili teacher’s Uncle Jacques, a doctor at a local hospital, and his family. Here she toured schools and watched the Rwandan elections unfold. She then flew out of Kigali to return to New York and begin consolidating her research for her IP. She is currently working on a short video and picture presentation to show to New York high school students. Samantha will integrate these videos and pictures into her IP.

Janny Chan - Zambia and China

Janny's research situates itself on the intersection of "China" and "Africa" in Zambia. She is interested in the interactions among Chinese and Zambians across multiple work settings, including the telecommunications, construction, and textile industries. Specifically, She wants to know how larger political, economic, and historical processes shape the Chinese and Zambian experience, bringing them together in the most unlikely of circumstances, and how they themselves negotiate their positions, understand and construct their experiences within these larger processes. In previous fieldwork, she closely examined Chinese and Zambian interactions at a Chinese-owned multinational telecommunications company. Next year, she hopes to do long-term fieldwork using the data I previously collected and comparing the data to Chinese and Zambian interactions in the construction and textile industries. Janny's research aims to localize studies on China and African relations and try to ascertain how people are relating to each other on the ground.