- March 21, 2025
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Aadam Abdullah, a Windermere Preparatory School senior, turned on the light for the first time in a family home in the Nazreti village in northern Tanzania, Africa.
The eight children living in the home were amazed.
It was the first time the family had electricity in the home.
Seeing the children’s reactions was the moment Abdullah knew he was making an impact during Windermere Preparatory School’s annual trip to the Arusha region in Tanzania.
Abdullah traveled with 28 other Windermere Prep students for a Nord Anglia Education Global Expedition trip consisting of education, community service and exploration.
After 24 hours of traveling from Orlando to Atlanta, Georgia, to Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Tanzania and then hopping into a van from Kilimanjaro to the Arusha region, the students finally arrived at the Nord Anglia Education-operated camp, Shamba Kipara.
From there, the work began.
Students worked to build new classrooms and desks for Ngongongare Primary School.
For at least six hours for two days straight, students endured physical labor for the betterment of the school and the Nazreti village.
They had to build desks, mix cement, lay bricks, work on wiring for electricity and more. Without cement trucks and other resources, students were left doing the work by hand. Junior Kamilah Hamdan said it was a full-body workout each day.
“There were so many times where I just wanted to go sit down in the shade and just relax for a little bit, but in the end, I kept telling myself, ‘This is for the greater good. These kids are going to be able to benefit from my partial discomfort for a couple hours. It’s not going to kill me to do it, and I’m going to feel good after doing it. You just have power through it,’” Abdullah said.
Bernardo Baratz said he went into classrooms that were so packed with students there weren’t enough desks for each of them, making him more determined to get the job done.
“Knowing that when we were building desks, we were putting all of our hard effort into giving these kids basic needs just to be able to learn felt really amazing for me,” he said.
Knowing one desk could impact several children in the village for years to come inspired the Windermere Prep students to push through any exhaustion.
And it paid off.
Abdullah said it was rewarding to see the children smiling and laughing as the newly built desks were brought into the classroom.
Students also were able to interact with individual families in the village, helping to bring electricity to their homes and building a shed for the goats the students were donating to the village.
While working with one family on their home, Baratz and senior Natalia Perocco said a single mother, whose husband died from diabetes, beamed with pride giving them a tour of her two-bedroom home in which at least 11 children lived.
Hearing her story and seeing their lifestyle was an eye-opening experience, they said.
After finishing their work on the second day at the school, Windermere Prep students were able to have fun with the Tanzanian children. Although they didn’t speak the same language, they found common ground over soccer.
“I love soccer, so getting to see how these kids play in the conditions they have and still find joy in these things was impactful on me,” Abdullah said. “I’ve grown up playing soccer my whole life, and I’m seeing a bunch of little kids that remind me, just like me when I was younger, just running around playing, and they whooped us, but it was still a great experience.”
Windermere Prep lost 6-1 against Ngongongare Primary School.
Hamdan will never forget dozens of Windermere Prep and Ngongongare students coming together for a giant game of Ring Around the Rosie.
After the hours of labor, students were able to return to camp and swim in the pool.
They met other Nord Anglia students from around the world.
Besides the community service projects, students also went on field trips, including a tour of a coffee farm, and they went on a safari.
At the coffee farm, Perocco said they learned about the village’s culture, how their village works, the various plants and what they are used for, and more.
On the safari, students saw dozens of animals, including a jaguar, which Abdullah recalled the tour guide saying he’d only seen one before in the six years he had been working as a tour guide.
Students also went camping, learning how to be self-sufficient by putting up their own tents and making their own food.
Abdullah’s favorite memory from camping was when he and his friends spent 30 to 40 minutes trying to break a big log in half with a rock. The log served no purpose other than a fun way to pass the time until dinner was ready.
“We just started to make makeshift tools and started hammering at this massive log,” he said. “It eventually snapped. We were all really excited when that happened.”
The trip was an opportunity for Windermere Prep students to serve the global community, but it also had an impact on them.
Students said seeing how people in another country are living without easy access to water and electricity have made them more grateful for what they have at home.
“I believe this trip just makes us all start to see everything in a different way and be appreciative of the small things,” Perocco said. “Over there, if you have a simple hair tie on your arm and you give it to the girls over there, they’ll take it as one of the biggest gifts they ever received. So this trip just really taught me how to be more grateful.”
Spending time with students from around the world helped Windermere Prep students learn to communicate with people who don’t speak the same language.
Students learned words and phrases in Swahili, such as “jambo,” which means “hello.”
The community-service projects and camping taught them life skills they can take with them into the future.
Baratz was able to see what his family does for a living as many family members work in construction, he said. It just took traveling to a different country for him to experience it, he joked. He enjoyed the construction work in Tanzania so much he’s considering applying for a construction job to gain experience.
“For me, this was a very connecting moment to my family’s history,” he said.
Without access to their phones, Baratz, Perocco and Hamdan all said they were able to connect more with others. They became friends with people they said they might not otherwise have spoken to before. By the end of the trip, Baratz said he, along with other students, felt they no longer needed their phones.
“We just kind of learned to live with (one another), and we became comfortable in a way that I feel like we wouldn’t have with our phones,” Baratz said.
While in Tanzania, students also were able to see where the clinic will be constructed in the Nazreti village this summer.
Kelly Freundt, the Nord Anglia Education global partnership lead at Windermere Prep, said during last year’s trip to Tanzania, students saw firsthand how difficult it can be to access health care when they saw someone get injured.
She said students questioned why the injured person couldn’t simply be taken to the hospital. The answer: not everyone has a car to drive the lengthy distance to the hospital. Students started diving into research mortality rates for children and other health care statistics in the region.
This experience inspired them to raise money to build a clinic in the village. It will be a place for those in the village to receive treatment for broken bones, malaria and more. It also will be a place for mothers to give birth.
Windermere Preparatory School is working with Children’s Miracle Network. The school has a goal to raise $100,000, 30% of which will go toward the clinic in Tanzania while the rest will go to Children’s Miracle Network.
So far the school has raised $50,000, of which $18,000 is earmarked for Tanzania. It will cost about $30,000 to build the clinic. If the funds are raised, the clinic could be constructed this summer.
