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Written by Hyago Santana Moreira

When I was a child, Africa was used by my family as an example to fuel my imagination. I was told to finish my plate because "children in Africa were hungry," but no one really explained why that was, who was responsible for their hunger, or whether that sentence reflected the African people and their reality. Africa just seemed like a place marked by hardship. But I always felt curious: what is Africa really like, how do people live there, and what drives the stories of hardships we hear about?

That curiosity led me, at sixteen, to apply to attend United World College in Tanzania. I didn't get in, but the questions remained. This summer, with support from the International Studies Travel Award from the School for International Studies, I finally got to go! Through a field school in Tanzania and later, community visits in northern Uganda, I studied social movements, food systems, economic development, and climate change, not only through readings or lectures, but through markets, farms, conversations, songs, and the everyday life of people organizing around land and survival. And I discovered that Africa was much more than I had initially imagined.

Arriving in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam, the first impression was particularly personal because growing up, I had heard my grandparents describe their first time visiting big cities—the infrastructure challenges, the disorientation, and also the sense of being overwhelmed by scale and disorder. Walking through the Sinza Madukani neighborhood, I experienced something similar, struck by the contrast between the resources our field school participants could access and what the locals could access. At that time, I started to realize that the gap was not a matter of culture or capacity but rather structural—something I was there to understand better.

Some of the most important lessons were related to food. I visited two local markets, along with several small stores, and saw how people understood these spaces not only as places to buy food, but as places of health, freshness, and trust. Many people did not appreciate supermarkets enough. Local markets were places where food felt connected to the community. At the same time, these markets were crowded, lacked sanitary infrastructure, were improvised, were difficult to navigate and threatened by government redevelopment and displacement. I was always interested in food security and development policy, but in Tanzania, I saw firsthand how access to food goes beyond having food physically available. Food was present everywhere: in markets, roadside stalls, farms, and stores. Agriculture is a major source of employment in the country. Yet access still depended on prices, transportation, land, infrastructure, and income—and in that sense, hunger and food insecurity were problems tied to governance and power rather than scarcity. Because of this, participatory governance became something I wanted to help develop in the future.

Coming from a farming family in Brazil, conversations with farmers and peasants in Arusha and later in Gulu felt personal. I could always see the admiration people had for the land, not only as a productive resource, but as something tied to memory, dignity, family, and belonging. Some people spoke about how the land had, until recently, been understood more communally, and how difficult it was to see it become more individualized, shaped by outside interests. Others spoke with sadness about lacking the resources to invest in production despite possessing a deep knowledge of the land. Even agroecology practitioners in the communities I visited often lacked the money, inputs, machinery, or infrastructure required for a Green Revolution model of farming. Engaging with social movements and local organizations gave me a window into how communities survive through cooperative structures, mutual aid networks, and organized resistance to extraction.

After the field school in Tanzania, I traveled to Uganda on the invitation of the Spinoza Foundation, a Canadian charity working with local health partners, community leaders, and families to improve economic livelihoods in northern Uganda. Through visits to their partner organizations and community networks, I had the opportunity to engage with grassroots initiatives operating across health, economic empowerment, and community development in areas far from big supply chains and directly impacted by conflict, including Gulu, a city that recently went through civil war. This helped me to extend what I had learned in Tanzania, situating my knowledge within a broader East African context.

Professionally, this experience brought into focus and confirmed the kind of work I want to pursue. I want to collaborate with local governments, community-based organizations, and grassroots actors across the Global South to improve urban and rural development through policy, public advocacy, and social entrepreneurship. Seeing how communities in Tanzania and Uganda navigate these issues, shaped by different colonial histories and governance structures, with hope, collaboration, and cultural celebration, gave me a broader comparative lens and also a deeper humility that I will use when the time comes for me to do similar work in Latin America. Spending this time in a new place gave me the opportunity to learn more about myself: my ability to connect with people while reaching out to organizations on my own, my resilience in adapting to new environments, and much more.

Before this experience, my thoughts on development were mostly through the perspective I carried from Brazil: land, inequality, food access, and the role of the state. In Tanzania and Uganda, those questions became both more familiar and more complicated. I could recognize parts of my own world in what I saw, but I also had to accept that similar struggles do not mean identical histories, needs, or solutions. That is probably the most important way this experience fostered my sense of global citizenship. It taught me to compare without simplifying. I left with more confidence in my academic and professional direction but also with a humbler approach to how that work can be done. I still want to work with local governments, community organizations, and grassroots actors across the Global South, especially in Latin America. But now I understand that this work requires more than policy knowledge. It requires patience, listening, cultural respect, and the ability to see people not only through struggle, but also through the ways they organize, celebrate, and care for each other. And perhaps, more importantly, knowing how to navigate these differences across multiple contexts, and adapting local knowledge and demands to solutions.