Back in Davis: Standing Between Endings and Beginnings….

I am home, now, in Davis, California.  I came home on August 21, after 7 weeks in East Africa.  Although my trip abroad has ended, the work has only begun.  Already I have had 2 conference calls with my partner, Rose, who lives in Kisumu, Kenya.  We will be supporting projects to improve water and sanitation in Kenya and Tanzania for the coming 12 months.  Our job is to give support to the women who are working directly with communities on the ground. 

We had 2 weeks of training in Kampala, followed by 4 weeks of on-the-ground work in the communities that implemented the technologies that had been taught:  Rainwater Harvesting Tanks, Bio Sand Filters for cleaning water, Ventilated Improved Pit Latrines (VIP Latrines), Solar Cook-its (for sterilizing water and for cooking), WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) training and education.  We learned about the technologies, and then learned about what it means to transfer this knowledge into rural villages in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

I am celebrating the end of a trip that enabled about 1500 people to have better access to clean water and sanitation before I left Africa on August 20.  There is much to contemplate about this “ending”.  There is a sadness in those things that were left unfinished, the deaths that were present due to illness, bad water and malaria, the miscommunications that came from lack of experience, the sadness of saying goodbye to people I may never see again….. 

There is a sense of wonder at the resilience and strength of the women I met, the joy and dancing that were ever-present in the midst of our working days, the laughter around things like teaching me how to ask a person’s name in Luo (the local language near Kisumu, Kenya) and the victory of learning 25 women’s names in the space of the 5 days we worked together.

I am also celebrating the beginning of a yearlong commitment to contribute to a better life for the women I met and women I will never meet, not by flying in with a solution, but by answering their requests for information and training, by responding to the needs that they identify and learning the methods of response both for them and from them. 

So….today, standing in that place between endings and beginnings, I am aware of both how small I am as one person, and how much of a difference in the world can be made from the commitment of one person.  It was the summer of a lifetime, and will also have a powerful effect on how the rest of my lifetime is spent.

The trip has ended…a whole new adventure begins.

Teri Harris, graduate student, Community Development