Why Summer Internship Completely Changed My Bible School Experience
By Gabriella Lasater
On my 2024 Summer Internship, I had the opportunity to go and teach at a primary school for a day with my Kenyan friend and fellow student leader on the trip. We were in an extremely rural village in East Africa, working to serve a fellow sister church that our ministry was starting to partner with. Our job was to split up our team of around 50 students and leaders and go into all of the different classrooms and teach for the afternoon. My friend was teaching math to the oldest class there, P7, and I was assisting him. As I was walking around the school to go to my classroom, I began looking around and making observations on the other classrooms, and overall physical condition of the school itself.
The school was a private school, but you wouldn't have known unless I told you. It was one that lacked basic necessities for students to be able to get the most out of their educational experience. Their “buildings” had walls that were poles with chalkboards nailed to the middle of the makeshift wall to give the students some kind of idea of a classroom. One of the classrooms was not a room at all, but merely a few benches set under a tree. This was my first time being in a school with so much need.
Children were running around with no shoes, swollen bellies and uniforms covered in tears and holes. Doing their best to study in conditions that were way less than favorable. Sitting on benches with no back support, doing school in the hot sun with no access to drinking water and no guarantee of a meal for today, or even tomorrow. All of them tried their best to pay attention to the teacher, who had to also work in conditions like this. I was overwhelmed, and did not know how to respond to what my eyes saw in front of me.
But my friend, he knew how to respond. He told me how the primary school he went to was not too far different from the school in front of us, and because of that, he knew exactly what to say, to encourage them. So during the first recess time, all of the students from P7, which was the oldest class at the primary school, came and sat around my friend and I.
The children’s eyes yearned for us to say something to them, but every word from my head escaped my brain. I felt trapped and heavy from the students' realities that I sat face to face with. But even though my words failed, Bob’s didn’t. He immediately began encouraging the students around us to stay in school and try your best to do well. He reminded them of the importance and privilege it is to be able to have an education even if the physical infrastructure of the school is not how it should be for them. I watched, learned, and was incredibly impacted by my friend at that moment. I learned how he did not allow his own feelings of overwhelmingness to cloud his ability to encourage and lift up the kids we were serving. He used God's word he had hidden in his heart to know what to say to make these kids feel hope in a situation that feels hopeless.
I bring up this story to show how I came to the realization that I have to learn God’s word, not just for ME but to be able to impact others. Bob has been studying the word of God for only a few weeks with us on Internship, and he was able to take what he had learned in the bible studies, and apply it to an encouragement for the young students at the primary school. This visit opened my eyes to the vulnerability that so many students live in all around the world. Kids who go to schools that lack adequate infrastructure, curriculums, meals and a safe environment to learn, thrive and be a child at. But, I was able to see the light that came from my friends' linguistic capacity to construct a reality for those kids. He was able to encourage them, change their attitudes, and then invite them to come to our church later on that day. This internship experience truly changed me and my walk with the Lord, and my motivation for my education in his word. This summer internship experience taught me that I don’t learn the word for myself, I learn it because I know that there are so many people who will benefit from the eye opening education that comes from God’s word.