keeping in touch
Q&A
Alanna Wallace: turning volunteer work into a career in Africa Alanna Wallace (BA ’10) got her first taste of working in Africa as a student volunteer through Laurier’s Global Studies Experience program. She returned as a volunteer for two more summers before being hired for a full-time position with African Impact, the largest on-the-ground facilitator of volunteers in Africa. Today, Wallace lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and works in marketing for the organization and its registered charity, The Happy Africa Foundation, all while completing her master’s degree in Global Development Challenges online through the University of Edinburgh. What first inspired you to volunteer in Africa? I’ve always loved studying Africa. My mom will tell you that even when I was in primary school and we were asked to study a country in geography, all the other kids would want to study France and Spain, and I would want to study Ethiopia. In university I leaned towards learning about Africa and African politics, and I had some great professors who always encouraged me to follow what I was passionate about and study what I was passionate about. What kind of work did you do during your stints as a volunteer? Mostly I did things like HIV education and empowerment of vulnerable groups, mainly because of my studies. At Laurier I tried to focus a lot on health and development, so I helped teach HIV education to adults at seminars and to primary school students, as well as running youth groups and helping facilitate HIV support groups with adults.
32 LAURIER CAMPUS Spring 2014
(l-r) Wallace high fives a boy she gave first aid to; sorting through donations for the mother’s support group; caring for a small patient; hiking in South Africa’s Drakensberg Mountains.
Now that your volunteer work has become a career, what is a typical day like for you? One of the things I’m in charge of is running an ambassador program with our former volunteers. We’ve got a group of former volunteers all over the world who are promoting African Impact in their home countries. A typical day can be anything from writing blogs or Facebook posts for marketing, to meeting with interns, to going over budgets for buildings and renovations. Right now I’m working on a new HIV curriculum for all of our projects. Can you imagine yourself doing anything else? No, but I guess when you get older you may not want to be in the field as much, and there are some disadvantages to living in Africa, even in South Africa,
which is one of the most developed countries on the continent. There are challenges with water, electricity, breakins and crime. As I get older, I probably won’t want to deal with that as much. But for now, it’s a great way to live and it’s so exciting. How difficult was adjusting to life in Africa? Through my volunteer projects, I started to learn the languages in South Africa and get comfortable with the customs and how I was supposed to dress or conduct myself. I think people underestimate how difficult it is to work in a completely different culture, especially as a young woman in one that can be very patriarchal and male-dominated. I had to learn how to conduct myself in that way and that’s something you don’t learn in the classroom.