Mark Marchant signs his way through Tanzania

The fact that Mark Marchant '11 speaks Tanzanian Sign Language is not the only thing that sets him apart. Although he entered the Class of 2010 as a transfer student during his first year, he will graduate with a major in political science in December of 2010, making him technically a member of the Class of 2011. For Marchant, who spent his junior year abroad in Kenya and opted to stay on the African continent for the summer and part of fall of his senior year, his education has been a study in "improvisation."

Marchant, who is in the process of developing a multimedia Montessori curriculum for a school for deaf students in Bukoba, Tanzania, is a busy guy. He arrived at our interview with a ham sandwich to eat between classes, a blinking BlackBerry smartphone, and what he describes as "Masai sex beads" around his left wrist. The sex beads, he explains, were a gift from a "cattle-herding womanizer" friend with whom he spent time while studying abroad in Nairobi as part of the Saint Lawrence University Kenya Semester program.

Marchant spent the fall of 2008—then his junior year—traveling around Kenya with a schedule that was too busy ever to condense into a daily schedule. As part of his program, he spent several months working as an intern at the Institute for Economic Affairs, a public policy think tank based in Nairobi. While walking with Kenyan co-workers one day, Marchant recalls a young girl who asked him for spare change on the street, a sight that was common. She grabbed his arm in "desperation," says Marchant, remembering the pervasive urban poverty in Nairobi. With a shudder, Marchant remembers the sensation of her fingernails on his forearm.

"I felt those fingernails in my arm all semester," says Marchant. His return to Vassar in January 2009 after studying abroad was "awful. Vassar is a whole different kind of privilege." Marchant's return to Vassar asked him to confront the privileged environment of the College, and his observation that "I think a lot of people go through that" was of little comfort.

In part, this led Marchant back to sub-Saharan Africa in the summer of 2009 where, on a Burnam Fellowship, he worked for a non-governmental organization called Community Solutions For Africa's Development (COSAD) as the organization's enterprise development manager. His work at COSAD alerted Marchant to the potential for development when community members have already built up social networks. "It really helps convince donors to give you money when there's already a strong social network in place," says Marchant.

He was initially attracted to COSAD because of its unique development model: Rather than specializing in healthcare or literacy or finance, COSAD is developing a community center in Bukoba, Tanzania that offers a wide range of resources to community members. The community center will offer after-school programs, nursing programs and microfinance groups, among other programs.

But he laughs when asked to describe what exactly the job entailed. He found the holistic nature of his work at COSAD to be a drawback in some ways. "On paper it was very interesting," says Marchant, "which is what drew me to it, but I didn't work out exactly what I would be doing until the night I arrived [in Kampala.]" In one night, Marchant and the directors of COSAD mapped a plan for Marchant's summer, one that was largely up to Marchant to shape. He reiterates, "It was improvised in a lot of ways."

But for Marchant, an unexpected encounter with members of Bukoba's deaf community became the centerpiece of his whirlwind experience in Tanzania. While at Vassar, Marchant took courses in American Sign Language where he learned the basic structure of sign languages, a skill he translated into a Tanzanian setting when he "sort of fell into" Bukoba's deaf community.

A friend of his who worked at a local cyber café noted Marchant's interest in American Sign Language and his fluency in Swahili—a language Marchant says has been relatively easy for him to pick up—and suggested that he check out the Tanzania Association for the Deaf, an educational and advocacy organization located in Bukoba.

Marchant was immediately interested, and shortly after his first days working as a volunteer at the Tanzania Association for the Deaf, he attended a three-day conference on resources for the deaf in Bukoba. The conference focused on the necessity of interpreters for deaf professionals and how the needs of deaf learners differ from those of hearing learners. Marchant was surprised to learn how cohesive the deaf community is in Bukoba, but was concerned at what he perceived to be a lack of resources for these communities.

Tanzanian Sign Language came to Marchant quickly, and while working in Bukoba he would spend late nights expanding his Tanzanian Sign vocabulary while studying Swahili. When Marchant didn't know a word he would "finger-spell" it to ask a Tanzanian Sign Language speaker what the actual word was. He learned to conjugate verbs and make sentences flow together, and discovered that the language was "very informal" compared to the Swahili he was studying. Sometimes words themselves were "improvised."

Although he is not religious, Marchant began attending a church for the deaf in Bukoba and observed that a network existed for the community similar to the networks for community development that were helping him obtain funding for his work at COSAD.

He noticed a difference in Bukoba's "deaf culture" from the one to which he had been exposed in the United States. Because of the stresses of urban poverty, says Marchant, "there is no time [for the deaf] to worry about a hearing-deaf dichotomy in a divisive way." He found that his deaf friends were eager to teach Marchant new signs and bring him along to events that happened in Tanzanian Sign, even though he was hearing.

When Marchant returned to his hometown in suburban Florida in the fall of 2009, Marchant was eager to continue practicing Sign Language, and started attending events for hearing learners of American Sign Language at his local mall, and was impressed with the openness of the people he met there. "Any individual that is discriminated against," says Marchant, "tends to be likely to be compassionate toward others, I've noticed."

While living at home, Marchant visited Blossom Montessori School for the Deaf in Clearwater, Fla. before returning to Vassar in January 2010. The transition from time away from Vassar, his second in a little over a year, happened quickly: "Over a weekend," says Marchant.

But when he returned in the winter, he couldn't get a particular story out of his head. While in Bukoba, a teacher at the Mugeza Primary School for the Deaf said to him, "I just wish I could show [my students] what I'm talking about sometimes."

Marchant speaks quickly, gesticulates broadly, and is clearly razor sharp. He talks excitedly about networking and development and jumps from one topic to another with incredible speed—sometimes in mid-sentence. It was in this spirit that Marchant began considering how the connections he made in Florida and in Tanzania might come together in a single project. Inspired by the Blossom Montessori School's take on deaf education and the importance of networking, Marchant proposed a project to administrators at the Mugeza Primary School for the Deaf.

In partnership with the Mugeza and Blossom Schools, Marchant is currently in the midst of designing a multimedia curriculum for Mugeza that caters academics to the unique set of needs for deaf students. The two schools are engaged in a partnership that allows the students to communicate over video messages, and Marchant is hoping to work with the schools to help them increase their multimedia partnership after his graduation with the Class of 2011.

Towards the end of our interview, Marchant quickly apologizes for failing to talk about his experiences traveling around Kenya with his fellow study abroad students. "I ate a raw kidney," he says, and explains the beads around his wrist half-jokingly. "I ate a bush baby too," he adds with a smile. With a shrug Marchant says, "I sometimes forget how personal this experience [with deaf students] was for me. I don't know how interesting it is to people who want to hear about my study abroad experience."

At the end of our interview Marchant checks the time on his smartphone. He has to run, but adds, almost as a bashful aside, that his next step is to pursue a medical degree: "I always ask myself, ‘am I being useful?' and I always look at the healthcare people and think, ‘they're the ones getting things done.'" Concludes Marchant, "I don't like to waste time."