Staff Interview with Wesley Maraire

What inspired you to establish Tiritose?

While I was in university in Cape Town, South Africa, I worked as a Resident Advisor for CIEE and IES Abroad, and this exposed me to the frontlines of international education. My proximity to the study abroad students meant I could wholly appreciate the gaps that existed in the student and youth travel value chain. I started organising volunteering opportunities at youth centres and soup kitchens in local communities as well as overland tours across Southern Africa during semester breaks.

This experience opened my eyes to the value of exchange programmes for both the students and the host communities. Once I moved back home to Zimbabwe in 2015, I knew that I wanted to venture into the student and youth travel industry and thus established Tiritose.

Describe a typical day at work.

My days depend on the season. My main responsibilities include business development and adventure tour guiding. I typically reserve the mornings for administrative tasks like sending and responding to emails and reading reports from the accountants. By mid-morning, together with the internship placement advisors, I review enquiries received and the itineraries they would have developed, before touching base with the tour guides who will be in the field with clients. 

Afternoons are reserved for meetings with placement partners and site visits to check on interns and volunteers. I always try to make time, at least 2-3 days per week, to have dinner with the interns based in Harare and once per week with those based outside the capital. 

Why do you do what you do?

Zimbabwe has gone through more than two decades of isolation from meaningful contact with the rest of the world, and I want to play my part in reconnecting Zimbabwe to the international community. Student and youth travellers are the best ambassadors as the statistics prove that they return to a destination at least 3 times in their lifetime. Furthermore, their use of modern technology has a wide reach and is second to none as a way to showcase the beauty of Zimbabwe. In addition, sustainability is very important to Tiritose. I want to make a meaningful contribution to local communities through impactful projects that help solve current challenges. That is why we are going through the Global Sustainable Tourism Council certification so that we add an extra layer of accountability. 

What is your favorite part of your job?

I 100 percent love interacting with a broad range of people from all over the world, from students, faculty members and study abroad directors to church missions. All of the different groups of individuals bring a new perspective that drives our programming and interactions. As my job involves a fair bit of travel, I also enjoy visiting new places and exploring the architectural brilliance of each place. Ultimately though, it is seeing the transformative impact that our programmes have on local communities and the interns/volunteers. This drives my passion for Tiritose and the student & youth travel industry.

How do you use your education and international background in your current role?

With an undergraduate double major in Industrial Sociology and Political Studies, an Honours Degree specialising in Industrial Sociology, a postgraduate Masters in Labour Law, and currently in my second year for a PhD in Commercial and Private Law at the University of Cape Town, my education is as diverse as the people I meet. I have worked for American, European and South African companies, and all of this experience has prepared me well for dealing with people who have a different experiences from me. I am able to orient people to a new place quickly, and have a knack for ensuring homesickness is starved while students are abroad. My education and international background provides a firm foundation for my current role because I am able to seamlessly work with and through people, particularly matching passion with purpose. 

What makes your Tiritose special?

There are several factors that make Tiritose stand out from the crowd: 

• • We are the only Zimbabwe registered and operated student and youth travel organisation and 100 percent of the funds stay within the country, which ticks off the first box of sustainability within tourism according to the Global Sustainable Tourism Council.
• • We have a laser focus on programmes i.e. healthcare, conservation & innovation, whilst other players are spread thinly across disparate fields. Our sharp focus is informed by the pillars and needs of our country, which we strengthen through our programming. For example, we work with Tree Knowers and Growers and we donate funds that go towards the planting of trees, which goes towards reducing the carbon footprint of our programme participants. This ticks off the second box of sustainability in tourism i.e. protection, preservation and promotion of innovative conservation and environmental management practices. 
• • We are a registered travel agent, which allows us to operate tours to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Our competitors are in fact our clients as they lack this capability. We are in a unique position to provide an end-to-end bespoke experience to our programme participants. Our tours are operated by locals, and immerse visitors in the culture, which ticks the third box of sustainability in tourism, i.e. respect for culture & heritage. 
• • Our internships and faculty-led programmes have been approved to transfer credit by the University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, and Ohio State University College of Medicine who send their students to Zimbabwe through Tiritose.

What hopes do you have for the future for Tiritose?

We are focused on consolidating the success we have achieved in the last four years and taking our key learning points in stride. The future represents more ethical volunteering opportunities for individual responsible travelers, academically robust faculty-led programmes, professionally rewarding internships, impactful service-learning programmes, and life-changing adventure travel itineraries. 

We will continue to emphasize sustainability across our programmes so that we continue to be the trusted provider in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa within a few years. You can expect to see us working with more high schools, universities and collaborating more with outbound student & youth agencies from source countries who fit our ethical guidelines and child protection policy.

How do you help support participants?

We help support participants in a variety of ways; with universities, we contribute to the pre-departure course on campus, including webinars. For individual participants and groups not aligned to universities, we provide a comprehensive pre-departure package that helps them to prepare. In this package, we outline health and safety issues, including immunisations based on the areas they will be travelling to in Zimbabwe. We then confirm with each participant via a video call and request for their insurance documents, immunisation shots where required & what to pack for the trip among other safety and health issues. Tiritose has a robust internal policy, which we help our partners throughout the value-chain to implement. It is also the reason why we have a 100 percent safety record on all our programmes and adventure tours. 

Our in-country orientation is robust and covers health & safety at the accommodation, the local area as well as travelling around Zimbabwe. We issue all participants with safety contact cards, which they can use in case of emergencies. Each participant receives an emergency card, which lists the emergency contact details of the police, ambulance, hospital, and a 24/7 Tiritose staff member. We in turn have agreements with doctors who supervise our medical programmes who are on-call to respond to any medical emergencies and, along with Tiritose, provide a guarantee in the event that the travel insurance does not kick in on time, should the participant need medical care. The Tiritose Risk Management Policy, Professional Liability, and Personal Accident Cover have an evacuation plan in case of disturbances within the country. Because Tiritose is run by locals, who are on the ground, we are able to respond to situations before they escalate and implement mitigation measures expeditiously. 

After the programme participants return to their home countries, we offer reverse culture shock workshops for those who sign up, and we help them settle back into their local environments.

If you could participate on one of Tiritose's programs, where would you go and what would you do?

Choosing only one program is like asking a parent to choose a favourite child! We carefully develop each of our programs after assessing the challenges being faced by the community and the potential impact we are likely to have by establishing the programme. But if I had to choose only one programme, I would choose the Early Childhood Development & Health Programme as it literally converts a pre-school into a health centre where children get their immunisations and attend kindergarten for free, while receiving free nutritious food. 

On the conservation field, I would definitely go out to Kariba for the Human-Animal Conflict Programme, firstly, because Kariba is one of the last remaining areas where animals and humans live together with no artificial borders. As a result, there is a high risk of conflict with animals destroying households and fields, and humans putting up snares and poisoning the wildlife. As such, there is a lot of work that can be done to ensure we conserve and protect the wildlife and the environment. 

What advice do you have for individuals thinking about going abroad?

There are only three words that come to mind: Just Do It! To anyone considering going abroad, whether for an internship, volunteering or adventure travel, be like Nike and just do it. It may sound cliché but there truly is growth at the end of your comfort zone. It is a wonderful opportunity to meet new people, learn a new culture and skills, make an impact on someone’s life while making an even bigger impact on your own life.

What does meaningful travel mean to you?

Meaningful travel means careful consideration of the local community one visits, carefully considering the environmental impact of the travel and lastly tracking the chain of the money you pay to travel. Once you care about these 3 things, you can consider yourself a responsible traveller. It means you are able to assess ethical programmes that respect the culture and heritage of the local communities visited, it means you work with organisations that offset your carbon footprint through planting trees, for example, and it means you care about how the money you pay is being used i.e. is the provider run and operated from within the host country or is from a different country, meaning the money has no impact on the areas you visit.