By Beth Mechum, Staff Writer
Carrboro and Sakina are similar, and very different.
Sakina is a small village on the outskirts of Arusha, Tanzania. Carrboro is a small town on the outskirts of Chapel Hill.
Children play outside barefoot in the heat and dust of Sakina with makeshift toys often fashioned from forgotten food parts, like a ball made of banana leaves. In Carrboro, kids sink their toes in the earth at Weaver St. Market while their parents look on from tables under shaded trees.
Sakina doesn’t have much wealth, and the people live in ways many people from Carrboro would not likely understand – outhouses, a steadfast matriarchal society, children learning far too fast the rigors of household labor.
And those in Sakina wouldn’t recognize much of the life in Carrboro – the bright-yellow school buses taking kids to and from public schools, residents toting yoga mats to studios throughout the town.
While there are similarities, these differences are much more striking. But this summer, Carrboro and Sakina were brought together by an unlikely source – a student from Ohio. And the bond was further strengthened by a group of women who run for fun.
Team Sakina
Team Sakina is an all-women’s running group sponsored by the Sustain Foundation in Carrboro.
Team Sakina’s objective is to supply women with the knowledge and skills to become healthier individuals in body, mind and spirit. Team members provide assistance to Sakina by donating their time and fundraising efforts to supporting programs within that community.
To team member Ilona Jaspers, that’s just another way of saying, “It’s for fun.â€
“The bottom line about Team Sakina is that it’s just a group of women who want to exercise together, want to have some fun together and really enjoy each other, and have a support system through each other,†Jaspers said.
The Sustain Foundation’s mission is to create and implement specific sustainable solutions to health, educational and environmental issues by linking global and local community networks. The running group and the foundation are connected at every level, with team members running to improve themselves and the communities Sustain supports.
“It’s unique that this group has stayed together for such a long time,†Jaspers said. “It’s empowering and it’s very motivating when you find women that share similar interests as yourself. I work full time, I have two children, so balancing all of this isn’t always easy, and it’s very important to have a support network. We’ve all become really good friends.â€
Formerly an avid tennis player, Jaspers said she can’t find enough time in her busy day to get to the courts as often as she would like, but throwing on a pair of running shoes and hitting the road keeps her active.
The intern
Anneliese Gegenheimer is a student at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC, where she focuses on social entrepreneurship and how businesses are run in developing countries.
Gegenheimer went to Sakina this summer and stayed until late August as a volunteer with the Sustain Foundation, which sponsors students in a scholars program so that they can attend secondary school – a luxury, not a guarantee, in Sakina.
Her job includes teaching members of the Sakina community some basic business skills: how to keep a budget, start a business or manage a program.
Gegenheimer is bringing new and different things to Sakina, but it’s likely she’s the one who’s experienced more culture shock.
“I was pretty well prepared for it,†she said. “I had been in Zanzabar for a month before this; I kind of knew what to expect once I got to Sakina.â€
But she hadn’t previously gotten a sense of day-to-day life – kitchen work, for example, which is all done outdoors, and bathroom duties, where buckets of water replace spiggots.
But it wasn’t the outhouses or the lack of running water for which she was least prepared.
“The role of women, I wasn’t used to,†Gegenheimer, said. “I didn’t expect it; the women do the housework, and the men don’t.â€
Gegenheimer lived with a family in a compound and was thrilled with how quickly she was taken in. She worked hard at her internship, helping a community find better, more sustainable ways to conduct their business. But they taught her a lot as well.
“The most important thing I’ve learned is how to relate to people with different knowledge sets and explain a difficult concept to them using what they already know,†Gegenheimer said in an email in August. “I think this will be really helpful in everything I do when I come back [to the U.S.] and will really help me be able to manage a diverse group of people while still encouraging collaboration.â€
It comes together
It’s not just money Team Sakina raises for the scholars program. Members of the running group have gone above and beyond what was first expected of them.
“It’s been sort of an evolution,†Jaspers said.
In the beginning, they had T-shirts made, and the profits went to support the scholars.
“Over the summertime, it became more of a complete way of helping and supporting the scholars in Sakina, and getting more of a connection with those people over there,†Jaspers said.
Members of the team got the names and information of the scholars and wrote them letters, sent them packages and Geiger distributed them throughout the town.
Geiger is back at school, where her bathroom and kitchen are indoors, and the women are still running, trying to break last season’s times.
With Gegenheimer’s guidance, Sakina was left with skills in how to run the Sustain Foundation’s scholar programs, and some lucky kids will be more educated than they ever imagined.
It’s safe to say Geiger left Africa with Sakina influences that might never leave her life, and the people of Sakina were left with a taste of Carrboro that will sustain them in a new, beneficial way.