August 19, 2024
A St. John’s University scholar is honing her skills to empower deaf students while gaining fluency in Swahili by spending the summer in Tanzania as one of more than 500 college students selected from across the nation for the US Department of State’s 2024 Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program.
Savannah N. Everett, an honors student who is majoring in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, with minors in Social Justice: Theory and Practice in the Vincentian Tradition and Linguistics, was selected from a diverse pool of more than 5,000 applicants attending colleges and universities in all 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
Noting that she has been staying with a host family in Arusha, Tanzania, Savannah, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, explained, “I have been able to travel to different villages in Arusha and spend the day with tribes that have little to no exposure to English. Experiential learning has allowed me to grow tremendously in the language and the culture. From picking coffee beans with the children to listening to lectures from the leaders of tribes, I have really enjoyed staying in Arusha!”
The CLS program is an immersive summer opportunity for American college and university students to learn languages essential to America’s engagement with the world. Students spend eight to 10 weeks learning one of 13 languages each summer at an intensive, study-abroad institute. The program is designed to promote rapid language gains and essential intercultural fluency in regions critical to US national security and economic prosperity.
Through CLS, Savannah has connected with a local school for deaf and blind students in Arusha. During visits to the school, she learns to understand how deaf individuals are taught and treated, and the services that are available to them.
“As an aspiring speech therapist, I want to be able to look at the conditions and individual needs of specific populations to see how I can assist them in the best ways possible,” she said. “Being able to communicate with students and medical professionals at the school in sign language and Swahili is such a rewarding feeling as I work to attain that goal.”
Savannah added that her dedication to studying Swahili and sign language, and her studies of speech pathology, are paying off. “It solidified my goal that, after graduate school, I plan to work with minority individuals who utilize sign language as a form of communication.”
In addition to her focus on deaf students, one of Savannah’s favorite personal experiences is interacting with her host family—a married couple and their two children. “Staying with them for two months, they have really seen my Swahili improve, and I have grown very close to them,” she said. “I can sit down at dinner, reflect on my day with them and talk about cultural differences and similarities. They enlighten me about the Tanzanian culture I experience and about things I encounter at the markets or on public transportation. It is an amazing and humbling moment of cultural exchange that I look forward to every day!”
Savannah’s interest in the deaf community was sparked by volunteer work she was engaged in at a local advocacy center in the United States. “I realized my passion lies in helping them and spreading awareness of injustices happening in this community.”
Konrad Tuchscherer, Ph.D., Director of External Scholarships and Fellowships, Associate Professor, History of Africa at St. John’s, said Savannah has completely embraced her work in the CLS program. “In the villages surrounding Mount Kilimanjaro, Savannah continues to thrive in a world of cultural diversity and multilingualism,” he explained. “She has stretched herself beyond the goal of functional fluency in Kiswahili [another term for Swahili], as she makes a positive contribution to an underserved population in Tanzania through her study of deaf education.
She is a linguist, an anthropologist, and a speech pathologist rolled into one—and doing it all as an undergraduate.”