Keene Native Spends Summer Working with Africa’s Poor
Dowley
Keene Sentinel
Joe Vines
Boston University Washington News Service
November 13, 2008
WASHINGTON − Caitlin Dowley was going to be sick to her stomach. She was about to spend the next two months in South Africa, where she didn’t know a soul and was about as nervous as a Yankee fan sitting in the Green Monster seats at Fenway Park.
Dowley, 21, a Keene native, has spent much of her life dedicated to community service. A junior at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., studying international business, Dowley has spent much of her college career doing local charity work, in soup kitchens and impoverished areas of New Haven.
This time, her trip and the project in South Africa were sponsored by a Washington-based nonprofit, the Student Movement for Real Change.
With her parents, Bill and Vicki Dowley, in tow, she departed for John F. Kennedy airport in New York City on June 15 not knowing what to expect: “What if I don’t get along with the other people in the group,” she thought to herself. “What if I want to come home?”
She arrived in the terminal, kissed her parents goodbye and boarded a plane for her 18-hour journey to Cape Town with two bags: a suitcase filled with antibacterial soap to distribute to the villagers and a backpack containing her clothes, including the one pair of jeans that would have to get her through the next two months.
“A lot of people in the villages do not have money, and cleanliness is a huge problem,” Dowley said.
Traveling on service missions is nothing new for Dowley. As a high school student, she traveled to Puerto Rico, Virginia and Washington, D.C., working with United Church of Christ in Keene, helping needy families. “I really got involved and learned to love community service and helping others,” Dowley said of her upbringing in Keene.
Dowley’s interest in community service is rooted in her faith and in the teachings of her church. The mission trips she went on as a high school student were organized by Woody Shook, former associate pastor at the church. Shook does not take credit for Dowley’s desire to help others. “This is natural for her and her family. They are all very active and very community-oriented,” Shook said.
This summer was going to be different, though. “I’ve always been interested in Africa,” Dowley said from her dorm room at Quinnipiac. “My main interest is in extreme poverty.”
Dowley arrived in Cape Town on a warm afternoon and spent her first couple of weeks visiting the urban areas of Cape Town and Johannesburg. “You don’t feel as if you’re in South Africa because the city is industrialized and modern,” Dowley said.
According to Dowley, the impoverished areas of South Africa are predominantly black, while the more affluent areas have blacks and whites. Dowley said that you would never find a white South African living in one of South Africa’s destitute provinces.
After touring South Africa’s metropolitan areas, Dowley traveled to the village of Utah in South Africa’s Mpumalanga Province, her home for the next two months.
Dowley likened the village to a ghetto in an American inner city. Many of the village’s residents live in close quarters and earn less than $2 a day. Even the simplest tasks such as getting clean drinking water can be difficult.
South Africa’s infrastructure is severely antiquated or in some cases nonexistent. Homes in the village do not have running water. The water taps that line the streets don’t work because the pipes break easily and residents often travel long distances to get water, which makes bathing a rare occurrence.
While in South Africa Dowley undertook many community projects, including tutoring students in geography. Dowley recalled that when she showed students a world globe, they reacted as if they had never seen one. “They have such an isolated view of the world,” she said. “They don’t understand what they don’t have.”
Dowley, a 2006 graduate of Keene High School, also helped design an adult education program to teach the village’s women conversational English with the help of interpreters. The program is still being taught, and the South African government is now paying the interpreters to teach the course.
Most children do not have the chance to expand their education beyond Utah because of the high cost. The South African government offers free tuition to South African children who score 70 or above on the school exit exam but in the black villages only about one student every two years earns a high enough score, she said. The average score on the test, she noted, is 50.
Dowley and her friends also converted an old storage room at the Samson Primary School into a library to organize the school’s books.
“She was committed to empowering the local community. For her, it wasn’t about going out and experiencing poverty,” said Saul Garlick, board chairman of the Student Movement for Real Change, which organized the trip. “For her, it seemed a lot more about understanding the community, but also finding ways for local communities to solve their own problems.”
Garlick started the organization in 2001 when he was a senior in high school. Its mission, he said, is to improve health and education in neglected regions of the world.
Garlick emphasized the work Dowley did running sanitation workshops with HIV/AIDS patients. He estimated that 25 percent of the village’s residents are HIV-positive. “Everyone has a family member who has been affected by the disease,” Garlick said.
Like Dowley, Garlick is optimistic about the country’s future. “Young people in South Africa are constantly pursuing solutions, and they’re ready to take risks, and they’re looking for work, and they’re studying without any real hope of getting to university because there’s no money, they’re still working hard,” Garlick said.
As in every society, there are stigmas associated with being HIV-positive, and one of the reasons AIDS is an epidemic is that it is difficult to for people to get tested. While the test is free, many people can’t afford transportation to the clinic. Dowley estimated that unemployment in the village is 60 percent and that only 25 percent of the village’s residents had been tested for the AIDS virus.
What Dowley will remember most is her host family and how welcomed she felt. “I would come from work and there would be 25 kids wanting to hang out with me,” she said. “Living with my host family, I was able to understand South African culture so much better.”
Dowley had wanted to go to South Africa for some time but can’t see getting back any time soon. But as her father, Bill Dowley, put it, “When she wants to get behind a project and push her energy, she’s usually successful.”
Dowley’s summer in South Africa made her think more about domestic poverty issues and the cultural values of the United States. “In South Africa, they might be very poor but they have really close knit communities and families. They are ignorant to the things they don’t have,” Dowley said. “In the United States, the poor see what they don’t have everyday. The United States doesn’t have the culture of being as close to family and friends.”
Most importantly, her summer made her reexamine her own life. “I value the simple things in my life more,” she said. “I’m a lot more of appreciative of what I have.”
If you would like more information about the Student Movement for Real Change, visit its Web site at http://www.studentmovementusa.org
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