Students gain international perspective on child welfare

This summer, 10 Willamette Law students, one 2023 graduate and Professors Sheri Buske and Susan Cook flew 10,000 miles to Tanzania for a three-week learning opportunity in international child welfare.

For Buske, it was the best of many student trips she’s taken. For the students, it was impactful from day one, changing their perspectives on children’s rights and international law as they experienced a different culture firsthand.

Buske and Cook traveled to Tanzania in November 2022 to pre-plan the students’ work. The trip in June was the culmination of Buske’s International Children’s Rights summer course. It included a safari and bush camping with Maasai warriors, a community service project at a rural school, and 21 site visits over 22 days.

The group went to orphanages, a pediatrics unit in a hospital, local schools, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that work with women’s and children’s rights, a juvenile jail, a Maasai girls’ school and more. They also visited a law school, where they shadowed local law students, hosted them for dinner and held a moot court debate. There were daily class sessions and a final research paper submitted by each student after the trip.

“They worked hard. It sounds fun, and the experiential learning was fun, but they were tired,” Cook says. “They were grappling with moral and ethical issues, seeing a level of poverty that you theoretically know exists. But when you see it so acutely, it makes an impact.”

On Buske’s previous trips, there has always been a moment where students’ worldviews are challenged, and they are forced to reevaluate their own perspectives. She and Cook anticipated that would happen again.

“In the beginning, they could only see what wasn’t — the lack. ‘It’s dirty.’ ‘There’s not enough of this.’ ‘Why don’t they just do X or Y or Z?’ It was all filtered through their American experience,” Buske says. “Three weeks later, what I could see in them was they no longer saw the absence or the lack, they saw what there was — the resilience, joy, grit and potential — and they embraced that with everything in them.”

Rachel Burns JD’24 was amazed by the programs the group visited. Despite their lack of resources, they used their time, talents and creativity to help vulnerable children, she says. Seeing how they worked to meet children’s needs in a child welfare and child rights context was ‘magic.’

“I was stretched personally, professionally, spiritually and academically on this trip,” she says. “I was uncomfortable many times, but I pushed through the pain and discomfort, and I saw growth in myself.”

Buske says the international context provides a place for students to struggle and reconsider who they will be as future attorneys.

“I believe that this is the education that law students need and want. This experience provides a face and context to what they are learning in the classroom,” Buske says. “One of the most consistent themes in the students’ final reflection papers is that they spend all this time in law school reading about people and theories, but with programs like this, they have to really grapple with what advocacy actually looks like, and it can be absolutely life-changing.”