Matthew Bender: My name is Matthew Bender. I am the assistant professor in the department of History. The title of the research program we are working on is "It is God's Will and also Deforestation: Local Discourses and the Disappearance of Kilimanjaro's Glaciers."

I came up with the idea for the project a few years ago. I was working on the subset Mount Kilimanjaro conducting interviews. I randomly asked a person what they thought about the melting of Kilimanjaro's glaciers. I asked them why it was happening. They said, "Well, it is God's will and it is deforestation." I found the answer really intriguing.

In the Spring, I decided I really wanted to go back to Mount Kilimanjaro for the purpose of investigating these questions about how this community of banana farmers thinks about the melting of glaciers and global warming. I discussed it with the dean of the School of Culture and Society, and she suggested it would be a great opportunity to take students, not only to involve them in academic research, but also to take them to a Continent where they had never been and to experience different cultures and languages.

The two students I chose were Tamara Bleskey and Beatrice Paulk [sp]. Both Tamara and Beatrice received funding from the Robling [sp] grant, which is offered through the School of Culture and Society and is used for funding for the Muze [sp] program.

Tamara Bleskey: My name is Tamara Bleskey and I am a rising Junior with a double major in History and Women in Gender studies with a concentration in international studies. The project that we are working on has us researching in Tanzania, specifically Moshi [sp] off the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro.

When we talk about global warming, we talk about it in a global context. So we are trying to localize global warming and see how it is going to directly affect the 800, 000 people living on this mountain. So we spent five weeks in Tanzania interviewing these people.

Beatrice Paulk: My name is Beatrice Paulk. I am a rising Junior and I am an English and History major. Right now, we are working to compile everything we have done. So we are looking at secondary sources, primary sources, we are transcribing the interviews we have done, putting our surveys into databases. We are just looking to see where everything fits.

Matthew: Virtually everyone we spoke with believes that the glaciers on the mountain are melting, but they believe that the glaciers have been melting for as long as they have ever been there.

99% of the people we talked to said that deforestation is the reason the glaciers are melting. Relatively few people mentioned that it was a global phenomenon. People have associated the presence of trees with the presence of water.

People now see that the glaciers are getting smaller, they see fewer trees, and they see water being less readily available. It makes perfect sense that deforestation would be a factor.

Perhaps the most interesting thing from the whole study is that we have scientists who now believe that forestry is an issue; same conclusion, two very different ways of coming at them.

Beatrice: My experience in Africa was really a life changing thing. I got to see things, hear things, eat things, and just be submerged into a culture where I was really foreign too, and not knowing the language.

Tamara: Muze not only allowed me to go to Tanzania but allowed me to conduct research over there. It is very different being a researcher over in a different country than being a tourist. And although I got to see a lot of things that a tourist would see, I saw them from a different angle.

Matthew: I think that the best thing is that Muze allowed me to take research that I had been working on for a long time and share it with my students. And what Muze allowed me to do was to combine being a teacher with being a scholar in a way in which I could bring my subject matter to life in the eyes of my students.