By Greta Haroldson / Features Editor
Sitting in her apartment in Mtwapa, Kenya, more than 8,000 miles away from her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, Meg Beuter reminisced into the phone about the Winterim trip that changed her life.
In January of 2020, Meg and six other Harpeth Hall upperclassmen traveled to Lwala, Kenya in partnership with the Lwala Community Alliance (LCA), a nonprofit with close ties to Nashville. Like many Winterim students, Meg’s choice to travel to Kenya was a mix of personal interest—she had been considering a career in education—and sheer curiosity.
Meg recalled, “I don’t even remember what specifically drew me in. I had never traveled to Africa—most Americans never get the chance to go. So I thought, well, I want to try something totally new, and I’m interested in service learning and education, and a part of the Lwala Community Alliance is education and working with schools. So I joined the trip.”
But unlike the other Winterim travel groups that year, Meg and her friends stayed in Nashville for a whole week. “We read a book by Melinda Gates about her work supporting girls’ education in East Africa, and then we heard directly from the CEO and founder of the LCA, just getting that broad introduction before we were immersed,” Meg said. “I think that was really crucial to our experience, because we were about to find ourselves in Kenya for eleven, twelve days, which was an entirely different context than any of us were familiar with.”
After several flights and hours of driving along the dirt roads of rural western Kenya, Meg and her group arrived in the barrack-style guest housing of the Lwala Community Hospital. Despite her preparation, Meg was still stunned by the community she found herself in. The passion of the Lwala people to improve their circumstances, she felt, was unmatched. “The LCA and other organizations like it have this approach that is so centered upon the community lifting itself up. That’s actually the roots of the organization,” said Meg. The LCA began with the belief that the strength and capability of the Lwala community gave them the ability to help themselves. The physical beginnings, however, were in Nashville.
Milton and Fred Ochieng’ were brothers, born and raised amongst the tropical air and hot sun of Lwala. Despite poverty and a lack of access to education, Milton and Fred secured a scholarship to Dartmouth College, and, after graduation, the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Even through the passing of their mother and father due to AIDS, the Ochieng’s continued their studies, and, with the support of Vanderbilt and the people of Lwala, opened the Lwala Community Hospital.
Harpeth Hall’s connection to Lwala is due to an LCA initiative to improve the accessibility of girl’s education. Harpeth Hall raised money from afar as the mothers of Lwala sewed period products and school uniforms for local female students. A memorable moment of Meg’s Winterim trip was getting to distribute these resources to the young girls of Lwala.
Having the opportunity to play a role in getting other girls their deserved education was deeply meaningful to Meg and gave her new insight on barriers to education around the world. “It’s that widening of your perspective towards the way that people around the world live,” Meg said, “that builds empathy and understanding. The sense that we’re all part of a global community.”
Today, Meg embraces her own global community—her childhood friends and family in Nashville and her students and fellow teachers at Mtwapa Elite Academy. Currently teaching English to Kenyan high school students, Meg now uses her passion for community work to improve English proficiency in rural Kenya. Her current project is developing the school’s first library, founded by her and a fellow teacher. “It’s been a really exciting whirlwind of a project,” Meg said. “We did some crowd fundraising amongst our family and friends at home to get started, and since then we’ve gathered a lot of books secondhand from local places. The current project is to try to bring in more books from Kenyan writers, books that students can really relate to and see themselves in.”
Currently, the library is housed in a hallway closet and contains around 400 books, but Meg anticipates that the library has a brighter—and bigger—future. “We just received a grant,” Meg said, “from an English Honors Society in the U.S. to build space for the library next year. I’m super excited about that, and that the students have been taking full advantage of the library. It’s so lovely.”
The reason Meg finds herself so far from home today is all thanks to that fateful Winterim trip. In the fall of her freshman year of college, mere months after the experience, Meg decided to sign up for Swahili courses. Her interest in Swahili, combined with her passion for English and Kenyan education, led her to apply to the Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship program. That scholarship led her to where she is today. Looking back, there is little doubt that her experience in Lwala changed the course of her life.
“Travel is such a privilege,” Meg said. “It’s a gift to be able to open your eyes to the way that other cultures work, to how others around the world live. I think it’s really important for Harpeth Hall to continue this program, to make it as accessible as possible to all students.”
There is no current plan for another trip to visit the Lwala Community Alliance, despite hopes to reinstate the program in 2022 or 2024. Dr. Jennifer Webster, a sponsor for the 2020 trip to Lwala, said, “[Harpeth Hall] had just come out of Covid and we were starting to feel like things were back to normal. But in a country with less resources, recovery is going to take more time. I think we understood that they would not be ready to talk about hosting for some time. We wanted to respect their priorities, that they needed to be focusing on the health of their people.”
Kenya in Jan. 2020. Photo courtesy of Meg Beuter.
Another factor is the rising cost of international travel. Getting Meg and her friends to a rural area of Kenya required many cross-continental and international plane flights, as well as hour of bus driving. Today, the cost of getting to Lwala exceeds Harpeth Hall’s current budget for Winterim trips, making it unlikely that Harpeth Hall students will be able to visit in the near future.
However, Harpeth Hall continues to donate from afar, raising $8,000 every year to support the Lwala Maternal/Child Health Initiative. The middle school service club, Care Bears, knits baby hats that are donated to Lwala mothers as part of pre-natal care. Still, opportunities for community work are everywhere around us, some closer than we might expect.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tennessee had the highest maternal mortality rate of any state in the U.S. from 2018 to 2022. Harpeth Hall can continue to provide maternal/child healthcare in-person by reaching out to our local community. Although Meg’s trip to Lwala may have been the last of its kind, her story can continue on in the form of domestic travel to our vulnerable communities.