First flight - leaving home and flying for the first time Artwork

Ekasi Podcast

We believe that stories have the power to influence and inspire our university community. Through the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at the University of Edinburgh, we are seeing the impact on the lives of Scholars but also the wider Edinburgh community and beyond. Thanks to this inspiring community of Scholars, stories have emerged about culture, race, identity, leadership and gender. Through this podcast, we want to use stories of day-to-day life to address these themes and inspire our community to reflect, connect, understand and where needed – challenge one another to make change together.

All Episodes

Ekasi Podcast

First flight - leaving home and flying for the first time

August 21, 2020 • MasterCard Foundation Scholars at the university of Edinburgh • Season 1 • Episode 1

Send us a text

Edited by: Geofrey Njovu
Soundtrack by: Ifeanyichukwu Ezinmadu

Episode 1: First Flight – Zoe Mebude and Blessing Mucherera.

Welcome to the first episode of Ekasi Podcast’s debut season. In this episode, our hosts (Geofrey and Julian) engage two student guests in a reflective conversation about their first flight to the University of Edinburgh. The guests are Blessing Mucherera, an environmental development scholar from Zimbabwe and Zoe Mebude, a Zambian/Nigerian student who has a keen focus on International Relations with Quantitative Methods. Both of our guests are recipients of the Mastercard Foundation Scholarship at the University of Edinburgh.

In this warm and hearty conversation, Zoe and Blessing reflect on their first time to ever step into the aeroplane. They look back into the specific experience of their first flight to the university. They speak about their family excitement as they were seen off at the airport, the extended layovers in countries far away from home and their bizarre and yet funny experiences with their seatmates in their respective flights. Equally, our guests explore the emotional impact this maiden flight had on them. They share intimately how on one end, there was the excitement at the opportunity to explore the lands they had only imagined of for so long (such as the vastness of Heathrow Airport) while on the other, there was a deep-seated sense of responsibility – the responsibility to make the best of such an opportunity and to also ensure that the benefits of such opportunities trickle down into the communities that they left back home. As such, Blessing and Zoe share how such mental schemas have provided a fundamental guideline of how they live their day-to-day lives as students at the University.

Tune in to hear our guests and hosts speak about a myriad of issues such as the concept of African-ness, and how their personal sense of heritage, history and identities have been not only heightened but also changed by something as simple as a seventeen-hour flight away from home.