Sophomore Lyle Friedman is curled up in a chair in the Tower Caf?© with a big box full of packing peanuts, some papers, and of course, chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies. "Here, would you like one?" she says. "My mom just sent them to me, and they're delicious!"
It soon becomes apparent that such generosity is the norm for Friedman, who has a warm, eclectic style. Her eyes light up as she begins to discuss this past summer.
Last summer, her first after college, Friedman packed up her things and flew to Uganda, where she spent two and a half months teaching local women about savings accounts, microfinance and small-scale entrepreneurship.
At the end of her freshman year, Friedman had found herself looking for a change. "I felt really lost and I didn't have a major in mind," she said, adding that she even thought about taking a whole year off. Friedman then got involved with CollegeCorps, an organization that gives grants and scholarships to students looking to intern in remote corners of the world.
Originally planning to work with African AIDS victims, Friedman ended up working in Uganda, which she called a "fairly stable dictatorship."
Friedman stayed with a family in a town without any police force. "Villagers would take justice into their own hands," she said, which led to the caning of her host brother for being drunk and the live burning of a person in the next village over. Friedman discussed these episodes quickly, noting that they were the only times she ever felt unsafe. She prefers to discuss the country's beauty.
"The minute you step off the plane, the colors are just brighter," she said. Nearly all of the people she encountered reflected the land's beauty. "The people are amazingly friendly," Friedman added.
And so Friedman plunged into a world very different from her own. "Women do all of the cooking and they work in the fields - it's such a sexist society," she said.
Friedman worked with 30 of these women, first teaching them a simple savings plan. "My first day was terrifying", she said. "I was walking down this dirt road, thinking, 'I am in the middle of Sub-Saharan Africa and no one knows where I am.'"
With the help of diagrams, pantomime and a translator, she helped the women organize a group savings plan, set up a small mushroom harvesting business, and worked with them to build fuel-efficient stoves, using materials like mud and cow manure.
Friedman said the stoves saved the women much time and energy. "It's amazing what a little not-even-advanced technology can do for these ladies," she said.
The idea of any sort of technology, not to mention organized money management, was completely alien to the women Friedman met. Words like "savings," "organization," and "meeting" simply were not a part of daily language.
Traversing language and cultural barriers built strong personal bonds between Friedman and the Ugandan women.
"At first, they treated me as a foreigner, but we soon began to joke together," she said.
Friedman's friends called her "shikiri," which means sweetly stubborn and silly in the local language. One evening, after a particularly strenuous day of work, Friedman remembered how they all ate dinner on grass mats together, listening to the radio.
It turned out that this summer, the United States and Uganda shared an affinity for Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie."
"When it came on, we all decided to randomly have a dance party," Friedman said, laughing.
Despite the tough spots, Friedman has no regrets. "At the end of the day, I'd just think 'Yes, I'm glad I'm doing this,'" she said.
By the beginning of August, after two and a half months in Uganda, Friedman was ready to go back to the States. "It was like the ending of a good book," she said.
Leaving Africa was an opportunity for Friedman to discover the purpose of her summer. "I've been able to figure out what development means to me," she said.
Friedman is now considering a major in Environmental Studies and hungers for a new adventure.
Yet she said the trip also taught her about living on her own. "There were days where I felt incredibly homesick, scared and out of place. If you can survive that on your own, you realize that nothing's quite that bad," she said.
And the experience was still a watershed for her. "I haven't quite figured everything out about it, but it's changed me, and anyone who goes will have the same type of revelation," she said.
