Travellers For Change

Never-ending Honeymoon
Jeanette and Robb Taylor, 61 & 64, Teachers - Lumsden, SK

Robb Taylor had just returned from his first posting in Ghana when he met his future wife Jeanette. There was only one problem.“He talked about Ghana a lot,” Jeanette says. “In fact I told him he should either stop talking about his experiences or marry me and take me on another posting.”

The honeymoon was a three-year stint in Tanzania that would kick off a lifetime together of overseas work that has taken them to Papua New Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania and Botswana. They’ve worked on literacy programs and projects in support of girls’ education. From 2002-2004 they worked with the Khama Rhino Sactuary Trust in Botswana to establish an environmental education centre.

In the past couple years, the Taylors have organized and led group trips to Botswana to educate Canadians about Africa, introducing travellers to many of the people and organizations with whom they’ve worked. “We had talked people’s ears off, shown our photos countless times,” says Robb. “Then we thought wouldn’t it be great for our friends and relatives to see and understand Africa for themselves?”

Motivation
At first, it was a sense of adventure, a search for something challenging and different. Why do we keep doing it? We want to contribute. After the first overseas stints, we felt we could live anywhere and cope with the challenges. This overseas life gets in your blood.

Frustrations
Seeing funding that was promised for our relatively inexpensive projects being cut or shifted to other larger projects, leaving the whole thing in limbo.

Rewards
Our children have travelled with us and on their own. They have a “world view.” We have an extended family in several parts of Africa. Not a day goes by that we don’t remember someone or some incident which affects our reading, our conversation, our reaction to the daily news and to our Canadian way of life.

First in a Crisis
Jody Sydor, 37, Emergency Relief Coordinator - Vancouver, BC

When Jody Sydor was a student at the University of Victoria she witnessed a fatal car accident on the highway to the Tsawassen ferry. It would change the course of her life.

“My first aid training at the time, while technically appropriate, still didn’t provide me with the confidence to act,” Sydor says. She did what she could at the scene but immediately afterward immersed herself at the Canadian Red Cross, eventually becoming a First Aid Instructor, then a First Aid Instructor Trainer.

Sydor’s first international posting with the Red Cross came in 1999, when she went to Macedonia to supervise the distribution of food and other essential items to 225,000 refugees from Kosovo. In May 2003 Sydor found herself in her first war zone, Iraq, where she conducted rapid needs assessments in the wake of the coalition forces entry. When not overseas Sydor is the director of the North Shore Emergency Management Office, responsible for emergency planning and preparedness for the North Vancouver and West Vancouver.

What is Emergency Management?
It’s about preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation, which some say is a cyclical process in that you constantly prepare for emergencies, and learn from your actions. It’s the perfect field for people who are problem-solvers with creative instincts, combined with a sense of empathy or compassion.

Frustrations
The slow process of getting a strong aid program in place in a disaster zone and getting the recovery process underway. Disasters are, by definition, overwhelming. Typically, normal systems and services have been damaged or destroyed. It takes time.

Rewards
I was in Indonesia for two months after the 2004 earthquake and tsunami. By the time I left to return home, we had emergency relief in place, and were starting the process of recovery. But in many locations rebuilding couldn’t begin because bodies were still being recovered, leaving many people displaced. Recovery can’t start until the emergency is over, but the emergency isn’t over for a very long time. It requires patience and perseverance.

Citizen Engineer
Paul Slomp, 25, Civil Engineer - Rimbey, AB

Only 25, Paul Slomp is already on his third year and third placement with Engineers Without Borders in Africa. He credits his parents with instilling in him a sense of social responsibility early on—“my parents were, and still are, global citizens.”

Slomp is currently working on an irrigation project with smallholder farmers in rural Zambia. The project’s goal is to enable these farmers to produce crops during the dry season, a time when they normally wouldn’t be able to produce anything. “The crops produced under irrigation during this dry season,” Slomp says, “can be used to improve the family’s food security and nutritional intake, or it can be sold to generate income for the family.”

Motivation
I look at the world today and see people living off less than $1 per day, without access to safe drinking water, and are unable to meet their basic needs. Then I see a world also full of wealth—people are living longer than ever before, and less effort seems necessary to accomplish more. It seems unnecessary to have people living in poverty.

Frustrations
Sometimes there’s a gap in the knowledge and understanding between project designers and project implementers. Project designers can be so focused on raising income and tapping into immediate international opportunities that they miss the local opportunities that are often less risky, and build the infrastructure and mentality for long-term export market gains.

Rewards
Meeting people like John Mwale, a 31-year-old farmer in a small village called Kampala. Five years ago, he was a subsistence farmer who hardly produced enough food for his family. Then he decided to learn more about irrigation. He cleared a small plot of land to grow tomatoes and cabbage. He has expanded this garden to 2 hectares and sells 5,000 heads of cabbage for $1 each during the fist four months of this year. Now he’s sharing his knowledge with the rest of the community.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Volunteer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.