Graduates of Mt. Lebanon High School crop up in surprising places, as Mari Dumbaugh recently discovered. She was in East Africa on a business trip and learned from a friend that their fellow Class of 2002 member, Michelle Santoro, was living on a catamaran in Zanzibar, where she works in regenerative tourism, where tourists work on a project that improves a location’s condition; writes and performs songs in English and Swahili and occasionally fills in as a safari guide at a camp in Tanzania’s Mkomazi National Park. Dumbaugh visited Santoro on her boat, Labda Kesho (Swahili for ”Maybe Tomorrow”), and got to experience some of her unique lifestyle.

”When you jump into the small motorboat that takes you from the Zanzibar shore to this lumbering boat, anchored in Pete Inlet Bay, you are struck by a sense of being part of something so much bigger than you; it’s hard to put into words,” Dumbaugh said. ”Without having to say anything, Michelle invites you to go along on her journey — and to take a journey yourself. I will never forget floating on my back next to the boat for hours in the dead of night in the bay, looking up at the brilliant moon, with bioluminescent plankton glowing around me. I left Labda Kesho not changed, but more myself.”

Dumbaugh reported, ”As Michelle and I reminisced about our upbringing in Mt. Lebanon while anchored along the coast of Zanzibar, thousands of miles away from Pennsylvania, we both agreed that the roots of our global journeys and evolutions were deeply connected to the education and community we experienced in high school.”

Mt. Lebanon Magazine recently spoke with Michelle Santoro, via Zoom, about her unusual life.

Q. How did you end up in Africa?

A. I joined the Peace Corps in 2008 and spent two years in a rural village in Tanzania. That’s when I learned Swahili. Afterwards I got my master’s in public health at Johns Hopkins University. In 2015 I took a job in Dar Es Salaam, the economic capital of Tanzania.

Q. It sounds like you were still on a somewhat normal career path.

A. My father’s death that year changed me. I started to ask myself if that was really what I wanted to be doing with my life. I’ve always been a musician. I’ve written songs since I was a kid. So I left my career with benefits, salary and housing, and did a retreat on a farm for three years. I intentionally looked at how I can live my values.

Q. And what did you decide?

A. In 2020 I had an incredibly formative experience in the rural wild nature of Tanzania. There were no tourists because of the pandemic. When you see an elephant or a lion, you are humbled. I did a two-week course on rifle handling and safari guide training. It showed me how simply being present in nature, in a place like that where you can’t control it — that fundamentally changed me.

Q. How did the boat come into your life?

A. A year later I went to Zanzibar to visit friends with just my guitar and backpack. Three weeks later I was pitching my tent on a double-deck steel catamaran. I ended up liquidating my retirement savings to buy it and have been living on it for four years.

Q. How do you use it for business?

A. Two years ago I started a floating classroom, hosting a Swahili wildlife TV crew. We followed humpback whales who migrate each year from Antarctica to Somalia. We developed a curriculum with local ecologists and marine mammal experts. After that I found protected anchorage in this beautiful bay. I made the intentional choice to let my hull grow wild. There’s so much life growing here. I’ve taken it upon myself to be protector of the bay, simply by my presence. I’m having guests pay to play — to learn about this system, to help clean up. It’s part of regenerative tourism. The way I look at it we’re all tourists on Planet Earth.

Q. What do you have planned for the future?

A. I’ll be posting more of my music on Patreon under Labda Kesho, and launching a series of books this year, mostly photo books, poems/journal excerpts and sketches. I have a lot of creative and scientific projects in the works, and I’ll be updating my website.

Q. What are you called in Swahili?

A. I have lots of names! I go by Meesh, Labda Kesho (the name of my band, my boat, my business, and my lifestyle), Captain Auntie Meesh, and Capteni Mishi (the Swahili spelling version). I also get called ”Fundi,” a Swahili term for tradesperson/mechanic/carpenter/engineer, because of a song I wrote by that name, which became popular here.

Q. What have you learned from all this?

A. Labda Kesho means Maybe Tomorrow. Slow down, don’t worry. Tanzania saved my life. I have become the echo and amplifier of this wisdom.

Q. How did Mt. Lebanon help you come to this place in your life?

A. I’m made up of so many contradictory parts and Mt. Lebanon offered space for all those parts of me. Athlete, science nerd, dreamer, musician. It challenged me, too. I remember my high school courses more than my college ones. Writing was always easy for me, but Mr. (Pete) DiNardo challenged me to say things more succinctly. Mr. (George) Savarese exposed me to a global picture, showed me that the world is bigger than the U.S. I was inspired to read widely. I got to flourish in so many ways.