Michael Kremer '85 was a typical Social Studies concentrator looking for a little real-world experience after graduation. Interested in Africa, he decided to take a three-week tour of Kenya in fall 1985.

He stayed for 11 months--and in his mind, at least, he's never left. Kremer is founder and executive director of World Teach, a non-profit Harvard group that has sent 175 college-aged students to teach in rural Kenya and China since 1987. To hear the Winthrop House alumnus talk, making the four-year transition from undergraduate life at Harvard to teaching in Kenya to working in Cambridge supplying teachers has been a matter of course.

"It's a little bit different from before," Kremer says. But, he admits, creating an international development program--for parts of the world which have never known televisions, private automobiles or libraries and in which volunteers can teach with greater flexibility than for larger groups like the Peace Corps--is cause for pride.

A branch of the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA)--a large branch with its $300,000 to $400,000 annual budget--World Teach recruits student volunteers from 3000 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. A World Teach staff of four full-time workers and many more part-time employees recruit, orient and speed the paperwork for dozens of volunteers each semester, placing them with Kenyan farming community leaders in Kenyan schools.

"We basically think of ourselves as a job placement service, even though we're not really a placement service," says World Teach Associate Director Sydney Rosen '87, who spent the year after her junior year as a writer for a Nairobi, Kenya-based branch of UNESCO. Running World Teach "is much harder than it looks, actually," she says

Indeed, for World Teach, without the broad base and political support enjoyed by organizations like the U.N. or the Peace Corps, delivering aid to the Third World runs risks not readily visible.

Citing growing unemployment among skilled Kenyan workers, Assistant Professor of Government Jennifer Widner sees the possibility that foreign teaching groups could grow increasingly unpopular among government leaders. "What they [officials] would really like," Widner says, "is for the U.S. to give them the money to pay Kenyans to teach."

Going Beyond Politics

But World Teach volunteers seldom concern themselves with politics. "We're a pretty apolitical program," says Kremer.

Indeed, volunteers seem engaged in a more intimate struggle, World Teach leaders say.

Volunteering students pay World Teach $3,100 for airfare and administrative costs to teach in Kenyan schools five hours a day for one year. Though most volunteers have no formal teaching experience, they work in community schools, called "Harambee," each of which can serve anywhere from 10 to 500 students. As many as 200 can pass through a single teacher's classroom in a day.

After work, teachers go home to small, concrete block houses, usually without electricity or running water. The teachers--20 to 25-year-olds who could be from Los Angeles or Topeka or Birmingham or Manhattan--spend their evenings under kerosene lamps, usually alone, writing letters and reading. The nearest movie theater or library can be a five-hour bus ride away.

Malaria can strike as many as half the teachers each year, Rosen says.

And Harambee schools pay their teachers $66 a month.

"It's a fantastic experience," says Elizabeth Oye, former field staffer. Stationed in Kisumu, a town in Western Kenya near Lake Victoria, Oye worked to keep church groups directing the harambee schools in touch with World Teach, completing paperwork for American volunteers and training new teachers.