By Nicolle Pangis

My ‘start’ with Team Dayā originally came in the form of simply being a donor to Jay and the builds he previously raised funds for. And each time I donated; I told Jay that ‘someday’ I wanted to join a build. I loved the mission of Team Dayā and bringing the gift of better education to underserved communities. As 2023 approached, I had two personal goals for the New Year. One, I wanted to get out of the media bubble and do something to give back to people who need support, and secondarily I wanted to do something that scared me a bit. When Jay told me one of the builds was in the summer, when my daughters were out of the school year calendar madness, I committed to the build and started to fundraise.

While I have travelled much of the world, mostly for work, I had never been to Africa. It took three flights and about 22 hours to go from Newark, NJ to Liliongwe, the capital of Malawi. Once the rest of the team arrived, we headed a few hours away to the community in Kasungu where we would be building a 5^th/6^th grade school. We got briefed on the community, received an abbreviated Chichewa lesson (the language of Malawi) and boarded the bus to the community.

As our bus drove in through an unpaved road, we were surrounded by members of the community singing and happily shaking branches. It was incredibly emotional as the gratitude of the community for receiving the funds and help for the school was palpable. We learned later a lot of the emotion on the side of the community centered around the fact that many in the community were illiterate (mostly women) and most children don’t go passed the 6^th grade, if they get that far. So, the idea of building a solid structure was not just about building a school – it was really about building hope, too.

After an opening ceremony, groundbreaking, LOTS of dancing, and get settled in with our host families, the real work began. And it really was work. We hauled water, sand, bricks and rocks to the build site – in buckets – on our heads. We learned how to make mortar, and then learned how to apply the mortar to the block walls.  By the time we left, we had finished digging out for the full foundation and new school latrines, and had constructed much of the lower perimeter of the school walls.

We spontaneously danced and sang (A LOT!) in the middle of all this work. We could not hold a candle to the hip shaking talents of the women of Kasungu. Beyoncé would be jealous. Off the charts amazing. And yes, they totally laughed at our lack of rhythm, and frankly I didn’t blame them much!

We slept in the huts of host families on a mat on the floor with mosquito nets as a malaria prevention measure. There was no electricity and no running water, so we went with our hosts families to bring buckets of water back from the well. ‘Showers’ consisted of buckets of water warmed on the fire, and you simply threw water on yourself from a cup. ‘Toilets’ were dug out holes in the ground. And after the initial self-conversation of ‘Hmmm. This is going to be different!’, it really didn’t matter. We had the best time. As it turns out, running water and real mattresses are overrated 🙂 And, headlamps work just fine when you are reading at night.

We played soccer, Connect 4, and Jenga with the members of the community in the afternoons, and learned more about their culture and customs. There was so much kindness and appreciation in the eyes of everyone we met, and their smiles were soul soothing.

Without question, in the end, we got as much or more out of this trip than the community we helped. It was life altering in so many ways.

I realized a few things as the days went by:

1. You need very little to get by. I brought a duffle bag for a 2 ½ week trip, and that included my sleeping bag inside. I did just fine. It was kind of nice, actually!
2. One team, one dream – really: In our culture, and particularly in the media industry when it seems nothing is ever enough, and everyone is trying to outshine the person next to them, this community did not give a hoot about a designer anything, who had shoes and who did not, who had a bit more than their neighbor. They were one community-they laughed together, watched each other’s children, cooked together, helped one another. This more than anything had the biggest impact.
3. Access to what we may consider ‘basics’ is not in fact accessible to many in the world.  Chenay, the 10-year old daughter of our host family got very sick when we were there. After several days of asking our host mother about taking her to the doctor, we learned the reason she wasn’t going to the local hospital was for cost reasons. After offering, we learned the cost was only $8 – and she had malaria and what we believed was pneumonia of some stage.  Seeing this close-up was sobering to say the least.

If anyone may be considering volunteering for a future build, I could not recommend it more.  Besides helping a community who needs it, I think all eight of the volunteers would say they grew in important ways as a result of the experience as well.  I plan to do another build sooner than later, and make it part of my annual calendar moving forward.

• DONATE TO NICOLLE PANGIS
• Donate to Team Dayā overall
• Contact Team Dayā Head of Recruiting Jaryd Knutsen