LAFAYETTE TODAY
Khandjumuni
 | | Back on campus, Danielle Bero began her senior year helping neighborhood teens stage
a performance of poetry, dance, and spoken words during a service program before the start of classes this fall.
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Danielle Bero ’07 wanted to exit her comfort zone and help change children’s lives for the better into the bargain. She did both last spring in Southern Africa.
Based in Windhoek, capital city of Namibia, at Augsburg College’s Center for Global Education, Bero took courses on development, political and social change, and struggles with colonialism and apartheid. (Her major is an individualized program called creative mediums and social justice.) She experienced much outside the classroom.
“Windhoek is a city just like in the United States—hotels, casinos, clubs, restaurants, taxis,” she says. But nearby Babilon, no: it’s a shanty town. There she taught some English, some colors, numbers, shapes, to preschool-age orphans and vulnerable children, many of whom had HIV. And there she found love.
“We drove right into the heart of the settlement, where corrugated metal pieces were renamed ‘houses.’ The children wore sweaters and ski caps in the 90-degree weather and had flies as permanent fixtures on their faces. I instantly fell in love and would upload videos of them singing and playing to show people back home.”
She saw another side of life on a rural cattle farm with no electricity or running water. Her host family named her Khandjumuni, which means “child of my own” in the indigenous language Otjiherero. She helped gut a goat.
Bero also stayed with a family in urban Soweto, South Africa, and visited Namib Desert and Victoria Falls, Johannesburg, and Cape Town.
“I thought I knew the extent of my growth and knowledge when I was still over there,” she says. “But coming home really made me understand how much I’ve changed and learned.”
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