COLUMBUS -- Julie Grotelueschen will be fulfilling two dreams when she heads off to Africa in January.
The 23-year-old Lakeview High School graduate has always wanted to travel to Africa.
But the trip won’t be just about visiting another land.
Grotelueschen also will be helping school children with physical and mental disabilities.
Grotelueschen will soon earn her special education teaching degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She hopes by reaching through cultural and language barriers between herself and the children in Africa, it will enable her to better reach children here when she starts her teaching career.
“I know this will be a big learning experience for me. I want to learn that if there is some barrier with a child ... how can I learn to still teach them with that barrier? That is what I’m really trying to get out of this,” Grotelueschen said.
Her desire to go on the expedition came about through meeting Katja Starkey, an advocate for Touch the Nations, a non-profit organization that provides funding and school supplies for Burundian refugees in Omaha and in Burundi. The people in Burundi have been rebuilding the country because of political unrest.
Grotelueschen will be spending several months in Africa. Her first stop will be in Thika, Kenya. She will go there in January, staying in a community called Joytown, which is near Nairobi. There, children with physical and mental disabilities are provided a home and receive schooling and medical attention.
“I compare it kind of to Boys Town,” Grotelueschen said of Joytown.
The community there, though, is poverty stricken. She hopes to be working in the classroom with schoolchildren throughout the school year, which runs from early January through April.
Grotelueschen will then move on to Burundi for about a month. There she will visit an orphanage where she hopes to teach the children. She might teach them basic computer skills and about farming methods in America.
The role she will have during her trip isn’t set in stone, but she is open to helping in whatever way she can to put her teaching skills to use.
She will be returning home in mid-May. While in Africa, Grotelueschen will be staying with a family in Joytown and with a friend of Starkey’s while in Burundi.
This is just the second time Grotelueschen has been out of the country. She visited Europe during her junior year of high school, but that trip was with several fellow students and was not nearly as long as this five-month experience will be.
“It’s going to be challenging. I’m going to be very homesick. I’m preparing for that,” she said.
When she returns home, Grotelueschen will student-teach in the fall. With the experience she gains from the trip, she hopes it will aid her career.
She chose special education after observing a fourth-grade class and then a special education class. The latter of the two appealed to her.
“Seeing the challenge and benefits and values come out of that, I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. I love seeing the success and the ‘ah-ha’ kind of moment,” she said.
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