Author Archives: abbyfate

Unexpected Home

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the book The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. This has been one of my favorite books since I first read it when I was 13. The novel follows protagonist Taylor, who, realizing that she needs to escape her small hometown in rural Kentucky, buys a VW Bug and vows to drive until it breaks down. She ends up in Tucson, Arizona, and through a strange series of events finds herself caring for a three-year-old girl who she calls Turtle. There are a lot of reasons this book could be on my mind lately – besides the Southwestern aesthetic that characterizes both Tucson and Austin (my home for the summer), it touches on perennial themes like immigration rights, environmental responsibility, and coming of age. But most of all, it is a book about building a new home in a foreign place.

Taylor draws together eccentric characters: anxiety-prone fellow single mom Lou Ann and her son Dwayne Ray, undocumented Guatemalan immigrants Estevan and Esperanza, used tire store/refugee sanctuary owner and activist Mattie, and grumbling neighbors Virgie and Edna, to name a few. Little by little, Taylor builds herself a home and a family in the “foreign” land that is the southwest, and eventually feels that she belongs there more than she ever did in Pittman County, Kentucky.

I don’t necessarily identify with Taylor’s need to escape her hometown. The opposite, actually: I am a homebody at heart. There is nowhere in the world I like more than the old red armchair in my living room at home, curled up with a book and a cup of coffee, listening to my family rustling through the house around me. But in the past few years I’ve found myself drawn farther and farther away from home, not pushed by a desire to leave but pulled towards the unknown. I’ve spent my recent months first studying in Spain, then traveling to Uganda with Water to Thrive and living in Austin as a CAPS fellow. By the time I move back in at Valpo for my senior year, I will have been home for a grand total of 8 days in the past 8 months. And though I miss my home, my family, my friends, and that red armchair, I’ve been learning to take a page out of Taylor’s book and build a new home through my community here.

Exploring Austin with Grace!

As happens when you move somewhere new, distant networks have become friends. In addition to Grace, my wonderful fellow CAPS intern, I’ve found strange connections that have slowly built this city into a home: like friends of friends who are visiting Austin for the weekend, old acquaintances I was vaguely friends with in high school who have since moved to Austin, or my CAPS assigned alumni mentor, who had me over to her house for dinner. I spent the evening talking with her and her husband, who met in the Peace Corps and encouraged me to pursue this dream, and, after playing outside with her three-year-old son, sent me home with raspberry bars and an open invitation to stay with them any time I find myself back in Austin.

Last weekend, I drove down to San Antonio to visit Elanore, a donor who was on my Water to Thrive trip to Uganda. She is a 65-year-old former Navy Commander. On paper, we have very little in common. But we quickly bonded in Uganda, sharing snacks and motion sickness medicine and stories on long, bumpy van rides, and so I spent the weekend staying with her and her husband. We spent one day shopping and going to museums and eating tacos on the San Antonio Riverwalk. People kept asking us if we were related, assuming she was my mother or grandmother, to which one of us would reply, “No – we’re friends.”

Visiting Elanore in San Antonio.

My community has turned this city into a home, made up of eccentric and unexpected characters. As my time here in Austin ends, I find myself reflecting on not just the exciting travel and meaningful work I have been lucky enough to be a part of, but also the community and home I’ve built in each new place I go.

Traveler/Tourist: Reflections on Two Weeks in Uganda

One month before I left for Uganda, I called my parents to share the news: “Hey, remember how I’m going to Austin for that internship this summer? Well now they’re letting me go to Uganda first!!” They knew that I was excited about the chance to work with Water to Thrive (W2T), a nonprofit that builds wells in sub-Saharan Africa. However, they were somewhat concerned about the two-weeks in the African bush with such limited communication. I’d already been studying in Europe for five months, so they had been looking forward to my return to the U.S. On this call, I didn’t tell them that I’d already booked my flights to Uganda, nor that I didn’t know if I’d get any funding. I had made up my mind to go. And nothing, not worried parents, nor homesickness, nor the crazy logistics of getting there, would stop me.

Visiting a primary school in the Mityana district.

My role on this trip was mainly as an observer — to gain some first-hand knowledge of the culture and various water projects.  Upon returning to the states, I would be doing research and data analyses on the impact of W2T’s partner organizations and drafting a grant proposal and newsletters.  So I had a role or a job to do — sort of. But as I stepped outside the Entebbe airport on my first day, anxious and sleep deprived, and not sure if I had the right VISA, I felt mostly like an outsider, and a spectacle. Robert, the driver who picked me up from the airport, laughed and told me that he’d immediately recognized me. My colleagues had told him to look for a “young woman with long hair who looks like it’s her first time in Africa.” And I did look that way: like a tourist.  Travel writer Paul Theroux writes that “Travelers don’t know where they’re going; tourists don’t know where they’ve been.”  I like this idea: while tourism is about arriving at a carefully packaged destination, travel is about the detours, the ongoing journey, and paying attention along the way. It’s not about arriving.

Jerry cans (the most common method of gathering and storing water) lined up next to a well.

In Uganda, I traveled with Susanne (the W2T director, aka my boss) and Gashaw (W2T’s Ethiopian hydrogeologist). Susanne called our trip a “vision” trip, to distinguish it from the many mission groups that take trips to build wells in Africa. While our visit was short term, W2T’s commitment to the communities it serves is long term and community based, and always works through local community organizations. But unlike Gashaw and Susanne, I didn’t have any real skills to offer the communities. While they analyzed water projects and worked out funding with partner organizations, my biggest role on this trip was simply to watch and listen. I could collect the stories and learn what these people had to teach me.  And in those two weeks of travel –– of bumpy car rides on roads built for cattle and bicycles, of celebrating and singing and impromptu dance lessons –– I learned that it’s not just about the water, not just about jerry can contamination and borehole depths, but also about history, and race, and what is enough.

Armed with a camera, a journal, and my hiking boots, I spent ten wide-eyed days trying to take in everything around me.  At the very first well we visited, I met a 23-year-old woman named Grace (two years older than me), who told me

Grace, age 23, is married with four kids.

that she was thankful that her four young children now didn’t get sick so often. In another village, one of the elders who spoke a little English told us that the old women were “crawling on the ground in happiness” now that they had water within easy walking distance. I chased kids as they shouted “Muzungu, muzungu!” (white person), who would 

“accidentally” let me catch them and then shriek with laughter as I scooped them up. Yet other villages would explain that their new well still frequently ran dry from the sheer volume of people using it.  They wondered if we might work on a second well to better sustain their needs.  I stood with villagers and listened to humbling and heartbreaking prayers. They asked God to bless the water he had brought them and to remember those villages who still need a water source.

I have more questions than ever, about race and privilege and responsibility. Questions that I’m only beginning to be able to articulate, questions laced with uneasiness and discomfort. But these questions feel big and important and relevant, and I’m excited to keep exploring and learning about these themes as I continue my work here.