Maia Abroad: UWC Waterford

On Saturday I visited a refugee camp. A crowded school bus carried me and 40 other students through the lush hills of rural Swaziland, bumping over potholes and gravel roads. The trip took over an hour. The mood on the bus was anticipatory - it was the first trip of the year to the Mpaka refugee camp (pronounced 'Mmpagka') where Waterford runs a program called 'Mpaka Peers.' It's a program aimed at helping the students in the camp with school and English proficiency. Visiting Mpaka is also a chance to play with some of the younger kids. For me, hearing about this experience was one of the reasons I wanted to go to Waterford. The work the school was doing in the camp looked amazing, and the Mpaka Peers program is also aimed at giving Waterford students a chance to learn from students in the camp. The refugees come from Burundi, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Somalia and the camp has begun to become overcrowded. We were told that many of th...

Those who know me, know that I care a great deal about food. My mother jokes that I can remember all the places I’ve been solely by what I’ve eaten there. She’s not wrong. I love learning about the food of different places – the traditions surrounding different recipes and cooking styles, the meaning behind dishes. I love finding new ingredients and new spices to incorporate into my own well-loved recipes, and I love cooking with new friends and learning about their culture through food. When I spent time in the Comoros, their spice markets are some of the most richly stocked in the world. I could buy huge bags of freshly dried cloves, packets of cardamom pods, jars of star anise and black pepper. Every few days I would brew a huge pot of fresh chai, after speaking to women in the market stalls about their own traditional recipes. In Madagascar, discussion with the local people who hand-pollinated vanilla beans yielded a recipe for a vanilla cream sauce that was perfect when serv...

Waterford is somewhat unique among other UWCs in how the living arrangements work. At most UWCs, including Pearson on Vancouver Island, you have multiple roommates from a variety of different countries and cultures. At Waterford, most people are in small single rooms called 'QBs.' They're simple - a bed, a closet, a desk, and a shelf. The IBs are housed in two hostels; Elangeni and Emhlabeni. They're affectionately known as Ela and Emhla (Em-fla.) Emhla is more central to the rest of campus, and considerably larger. It houses about 120 students. It's one building that has been split into a girls' side and a boys' side, connected by a common room and small kitchen. It's also older than the other hostel, so the rooms are a little more run down, the furniture and amenities are more basic, and the kitchen is - sadder. I live in Emhlabeni, in a corridor called 'Utopia' along with 10 other girls. The corridors are all given names - on the girls' ...