The Mali Externship Program
Since its conception at Montana State University in
1999, tens of thousands of US students, faculty, and community members
have gained awareness of subsistence farming life in a material-resource
poor, culturally-rich country. Mali Externships, and the idea of exploring
Africa by going there, or just by campus opportunities: discussion groups,
readings, and presentations, is moving across campuses. From coast-to-coast
and several points in between, Africa's cultural wealth with its lessons
for the rest of the world are the core of raised student / faculty cultural
awareness.
Africa's perplexing lack of economic / agricultural development in a
Western sense now challenges the same student / faculty groups to critically
evaluate foreign aid. An outcome of this project has been that students
in non-agricultural majors (engineering, biology, geography, music, business,
French, and media and theater arts) all pursued agricultural topics in
their USDA externship research and chose to continue in agriculture after
graduation. Over 120 Mali externs, from Virginia Tech to two University
of California campuses (Davis and Riverside), from a tribal college to
an urban, service-based, private university, have gained confidence in
cross-cultural skills, designing research, and giving professional presentations.
