The most beautiful aspect is "probably the Kenyan people," Oye says. Oye, who now lives near Binghamton, New York, marked that despite cultural differences, she developed friendships that she will keep for a lifetime.
Rosen tells of broader-ranging attractions. "Most people do it for a combination of getting foreign service experience, doing service work and the adventure of it," she says.
"I imagine it's out of the ordinary" considering what the volunteers do in Kenya, Rosen says. "I suppose I was interested in it because it's so remote."
Water From Springs and Water Tanks
There are difficulties for foreigners used to greater wealth exists in the countryside. Beyond the farmlands--which grow corn, bananas, beans and sugar cane amid green, rolling hills in Kakamega--lies a region that is severely undeveloped.
Elizabeth Brown, who taught in Kakamega and returned to the United States last May, recalls families living in mud houses, children studying at night by lamplight if they had any light at all and farms connected to schools and one another by dirt roads.
Education, though available nationwide, seldom exceeds the elementary level for most people in rural areas.
"As African countries go, Kenya is well off," says Oye. "There's not hunger, but there's malnutrition."
At Brown's two-room concrete house, students delivered water from local springs or rain tanks. She used a kerosene lamp and stove for light and cooking. It was "just a house and that's it," she says.
Still, she says, "I was pretty lucky. I lived with a woman." Loneliness and isolation are major problems for the teachers. "There's no stimulation out there at night," says Brown.
"Yeah, when you're in a village without electricity and it's night," Rosen says, "it gets pretty dark, it gets remarkably dark. There's a pretty big temptation to go to bed early."
For women, additional cultural constraints become confining. "As Americans we're used to having a certain amount of privacy, freedom, especially women," says Brown, "Kenyans have less privacy and are more critical of late night parties and overnight guests."
But such limitations ultimately amount to little more than inconveniences, teachers say. Brown says her year ultimately taught her more than how to teach in a classroom. "I enjoyed being stripped down to my basic personality and my basic attitudes...[without] those pressures which make people act in a certain way. What you wear and say and look like didn't matter there," she says.
"People were still dancing around with painted up faces, dressed in animal skins" on occassions of special ceremonies, Brown recalls. "Even though these are people who go to school...they still maintain a lot of local culture," Brown says.
Success in Its Own Way
For World Teach, having sent nearly 200 teachers to Kenya in two years, Rosen claims a share of success. "We're doing very well overall," she says. So much so that World Teach expanded this year to include missions in China, and soon in Botswana.
Volunteer continue to send applications and World Teach continues to contact more schools, Rosen says. Teachers from Harvard make up the largest delegation from any college at 10 students, and Rosen was recently name to succeed Kremer as executive director.
All in all, World Teach has lived up to its original recruitment posters in spirit, if not in letter. Kremer began recruiting teachers for the Kenyan schools in 1987 with the slogan "How to become wealthy on $66 a month."