One Last Post
I want to thank you all for taking the time to read this blog and follow along on our journey. Amanda and I had an incredible experience traveling with the Periclean Scholars to Zambia and hope that you enjoyed the stories we shared and found them meaningful. It’s an experience that we will never forget and we hope that some of what you read will stick with you.
As we readjust to life here in the US, I’m thinking a lot about the enormous privilege of time. You’ve read about differences in housing, money, disease and so much more, between us and the residents of Kawama, but the one that continually stuck out to me was the difference in how much time we have. When you have a 2 hour biking commute to work each way (see Albert, 2nd set of pictures), or you have to back fill the entire floor area of a home one shovel-full at a time, or you have to walk to one of 2 water pumps for over 200 houses every time you’re thirsty, or you’re waiting days for clothing to dry out on a line during the rainy season, you don’t have time to read a blog post, much less write one. When it takes so long to fulfill a family’s basic needs, as it does in Kawama, the privilege of free time to focus on other things is lost.
We came back here with the realization that we hadn’t really gotten the most out of our free time beforehand. Without access to the internet outside of posting on this site or a TV outside of the inauguration speech, we spent a lot of our free time in Zambia with each other and the people of Kawama. Remember the idea of “being with” from the first post? Our group would never have grown so close to one another or learned as much from the Zambians we met if we had the opportunity to retire to separate hotel rooms with wireless access to facebook or a 200 channel TV package. Instead, almost every second of our waking time in Zambia was spent building relationships and empowering others. There are so many ways that we can choose to spend the time we’re so lucky to have, but I don’t know if any of them could equal the experience we had on this trip.
While we feel so fortunate to have been able to spend so much time with the people of Kawama, we know that our return to the US cannot be the end of our connection to them and work together against the issues facing communities like theirs around the world. We’d love to hear your thoughts on our blog and would be more than happy to keep you informed on how we’ll stay connected to Habitat Zambia and the Kawama community in the future, through the Periclean Scholars Alumni program and other individual efforts. On the post about guilt, there’s a discussion starting about finding a way to provide mosquito nets to the whole community, so we’ll continue to post updates there, when we have the information, if you’d like to participate in that. You can also email us about anything, at dbaum@redwoodsgroup.com and anieman@redwoodsgroup.com, if you’d like. Thanks again for reading, we hope this blog allows you all to carry a small piece of Kawama with you, since we will always keep those faces, experiences and memories with us.
-Dan and Amanda