One University Student’s Account of Global Change and Compassion During Covid-19
Written by Lila Wells, Co-Founder and Director of the Unite Passion Project.
Let me be clear: this story is not one in which I take a starring role. Rather, it celebrates those in my life I feel deserve recognition not only as global change agents, but as envoys of compassion in action.
March 2020
A 19-year-old college freshman with less than five months of independent living under my belt, the world was my oyster and I was not yet ready to leave the comfort of its calcified shells. Towards the beginning of March, the influx of the COVID-19 pandemic into the U.S. downsized my universe from that of a college campus—where adventure was inevitable—to my childhood bedroom where, for 10 hours a day, I sat at my desk attending Zoom lectures and contemplating a question for which I direly needed an answer: How can I do more?
This question was one made easier when sitting a room away from a global change agent and my own personal hero: Anne Wells, my mom. At 19, she journeyed a world away and spent four months in a country which assumed a permanent fixture in her heart—Tanzania. Many adventures and decades later, she founded Unite The World With Africa Foundation in 2014. Unite is an international NGO empowering extraordinary-yet-impoverished and marginalized youth and women with quality education, health, leadership and business development programs to foster independence and long-term success.
In 2018, my mom and Unite embarked on a new venture to sponsor the A-Level education of uniquely-talented-yet-impoverished Tanzanian scholars through the Unite Scholars Program. Working in tandem with the NGO’s Tanzanian team and Program Director, Anty Marche, 42 scholars have been chosen to date through a highly-rigorous selection process based on academic excellence, personal advocacy, leadership, and extreme financial need.
Yet while I was able to manage my education in quarantine through Zoom courses, our scholars faced a vastly different reality at the height of the pandemic. Hailing from remote and under-resourced parts of the country, they lacked the infrastructure for online learning and slipped into a sort of educational purgatory; school was suspended, and our scholars had little resources with which to continue learning. [Cick HERE to see the home of one of our Unite Scholars Maria John Kwanga.]
Education is key in surmounting cyclical poverty and, as less than 3% of Tanzanian students enroll in A-Level education, our scholars had already beaten the odds in their schooling advancement. Continuing education during the pandemic was and is crucial for their success. With that in mind, I devised a scheme for educational enrichment using the most powerful resource we each had at our disposal: each other.
This, this, is how I can do more.
May 2020
I called on teammates I didn’t know I had—high school acquaintances, college friends, extended family, strangers, and my best friend from down the hall of my freshman dorm. Together we did what I first felt was impossible: uniting youth from opposite sides of the planet in a mission for self and communal growth. The Unite Youth Ambassador Program was born with the mission to cultivate connection, camaraderie, and compassion in the time of COVID-19. First only an idea I dreamt up in a walk around my neighborhood, friends (who soon became family) from universities across the U.S. graciously signed onto my passion project and pledged to donate their time to Tanzanian scholars they had yet to meet.
For eight weeks, I worked alongside these 11 American college students and 23 Tanzanian scholars as they built powerful bonds, explored the intricacies of physiology, debated philosophy, assembled resumes, called and texted daily via Whatsapp, sang together, reenacted comedy skits, and exchanged I love you’s.
Six Unite Ambassador-Scholar groups that participated in the program.
My singular Northwestern quarter of Kiswahili hardly prepared me for daily communications with multilingual Tanzanian students, widows, and the Unite leadership team. But they were patient teachers, not only to me but also to my fellow ambassadors, who eagerly exchanged their English, Spanish, and French for new Kiswahili terms from their Tanzanian friends.
The first time I cried was when listening to a Whatsapp audio exchange between my friend CJ and Tanzanian scholar Loveness Apaeli. The two came from vastly different circumstances: CJ an environmental engineering major at Northwestern University and Loveness a high-achieving scholar whose family only recently built their first pit latrine, with a Unite grant. Yet all differences disappeared as they exchanged messages discussing vulnerability, self-confidence and self-love in a world seemingly devoid of it. Their mutual support and outpouring of love after less than two weeks of knowing each other was both overwhelming and an affirmation of what the Unite team and I had already begun to observe; this program, this team was love in action.
July 2020
This vignette came many happy-cries later, and emerged as a key component in my next collaborative Unite venture: The Unite Passion Project.
The Unite Ambassador Program quickly drew to a close as July began and the Tanzanian government sent our scholars back to school. The familiar question—How can I do more?—began to creep back into my consciousness. Yet one Whatsapp conversation in particular caught my eye. My friend and peer, Danny, was discussing aspirational identities and his passions with Unite Scholar, Imani Faustine. As Danny raced between different potential career paths and outlined his passions for his friend, Imani asked the following: “Dan, you can have more than one dream?”
Imani touched on a question that most, if not all, youth and young adults ask themselves daily; What is my passion? Can I have more than one? Am I on the right path? Yet it especially resonates with our Unite Scholars who, when asked what they want to do with their lives, often deliver the same set of responses: “to be a doctor, pilot or engineer.”
This may be, in part, because their passions for medicine, aviation, and science is what drives them. But more often than not it is because these young people, most of whom come from remote and under resourced communities, know of nothing else to dream. As someone who began her collegiate career as a steadfast Chemistry major, before switching to Computer Science and finally landing on Sociology, Imani’s comment struck a chord in me, prompting me to reevaluate my own relationship with passion, career paths, and self-exploration.
This is how the Unite Passion Project was born.
With joint goals of career exposure and self-reflection, I launched the Passion Project alongside a handful of my Ambassador peers and the Unite leadership team as an international guest speaker platform. I spent the summer emailing strangers, titans of industry, professors, and my peers asking them to respond to a deceptively simple question—What is your passion?—in video form. And, to my surprise, they responded. En masse.
The YouTube-based platform grew from five, to 10, to 20, and, to date, 92 guest speaker videos from all over the world. Each submission was not only an act of kindness, but also one of compassion, in which strangers, understanding the uncertainties of young adulthood, detailed their life’s story for the world to hear. And the world did.
A few of the ~100 professionals from around the world who have contributed Passion videos to our program since its inception in August 2020. Click HERE to watch their videos, and more, on our YouTube platform.
Unite instituted seven Unite Clubs in secondary schools throughout Tanzania, where approximately 1,000 students and faculty viewed and discussed Passion Project videos, approaching each with the same intention and honestly the speakers did in making them.
And, in its inception and journey thereafter, a quote from my mom remained evermore true:
“In this time of widespread turmoil, fear, and suffering, we can—and must—focus on what brings joy. We must share what feeds our spirits and ignites our minds, bodies, and souls. Because what opens minds and hearts will ultimately be what unites us as human beings.”
– Anne Wells
November 2020
Unite’s approach has always been holistic. That’s why, when approached by Program Director Anty Marche’s sister, Upendo, with a new opportunity to support our scholars and their families, we were ready and willing to execute it. I say “we,” but this project was and is wholly due to the work of Upendo, her husband Romanos, Anty Marche, Clara Ngowi, and my mom.
Dubbed ‘Operation Chakula,’ this venture buys from small-scale farmers across Tanzania, holds the harvest, and repackages food supplies in smaller quantities to sell at affordable retail prices to communities in need.
In buying from the poor during harvest season, using advanced technology to safely store and protect the food, and reselling to those in need later on, Operation Chakula circumvents a market which inherently disadvantages the Tanzanian poor. In harvest season, market oversaturation plummets crop prices, yet most small-scale farmers have no opportunity nor the technology to safely store their food to sell later on. In the off-season, a few choice, wealthier farmers, sell their stored crops at an expensive price to consumers, but a virtually unattainable price to the poor.
On a mission to buy from the poor to feed the poor, Operation Chakula addresses regional and nationwide hunger while supporting the very demographic we seek to uplift. As most of the Unite Scholars come from extremely impoverished, small-scale farming families, they often return home on holiday to the stresses of poverty, food shortages, and hunger. To change this is non-negotiable. Operation Chakula, to me, is not only strategic, creative, and empowering, but it is also an act of compassion, in which powerful minds from the U.S. and Tanzania collaborate to address a core human issue: hunger.
January 2021
2020 has run its course and while its suffering has been immense, it has also offered us an opportunity for compassion and advocacy unlike any other. A year ago, I would’ve never imagined a Unite Youth Ambassador Program, a Passion Project, or an Operation Chakula, nor would I have had the confidence to assemble a joint collegiate taskforce-for-change on opposite sides of the world.
Yet in times of turmoil, we are granted the rare opportunity to rise above and work collaboratively towards the greater good. We can, we have, and we will continue to practice compassion, camaraderie, and vulnerability. We will continue to make authentic connections with those we admire both domestically and abroad. We will practice compassion because, in a world so divided, it is needed now more than ever.
Compassion is CJ and Loveness. Compassion is Danny and Imani. Compassion is Upendo, Romanos, Anty, Clara, and my mother. Compassion is love in action. And may this year bring so much more.
Lila Wells (pictured above in 2015 visiting a government primary school in Tanzania) is now a sophomore at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, studying Sociology and Legal Studies (intended). She has traveled to Tanzania in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2018 to help support Unite programs. Since 2014, Lila has served as Unite’s volunteer as well as Unite’s social media intern. In 2019, Lila took on the role as a Unite’s Collegiate Youth Ambassador Manager and founded and directed the UNITE Youth Ambassador Program in the summer of 2020. Lila then moved on to found and co-direct the UNITE Passion Project. Lila currently serves as the project's Videographer, Executive Youth Outreach Coordinator, and Webmaster.
