Letter of support from Stephanie Power - Junior Fellow 2008
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Josephine and Stephanie in our traditional Ghanaian outfits. Tuna, Northern Region.
To the Selection Committee of Sauve Scholars,
This summer, I had an incredible opportunity to spend three and a half months overseas in the Northern region of Ghana, as a short-term development intern with Engineers Without Borders, Canada. During this time, I met Josephine. She was assigned the job of being my coach, helping me through my placement overseas. She became much more than that. She was a mentor, a friend, a should to cry and someone to celebrate my victories.
From the first days in Ghana, Josephine introduced me to life in the village I would be spending my summer in. She had gone ahead of me over the past few months, looking for a placement that would suit my skills and interests and also work towards EWB’s overseas goals. She found a small NGO that worked with women farmer groups, and set me up with a placement with them. Through my experience with the Tuna Women’s’ Development Network, I learned so many things about development, culture and surprisingly, myself.
Josephine also made sure I had a place to live, setting up a home with a wonderful host family, who took me into their home and family with such love and hospitality that by the time I left, I felt like I was leaving a piece of me behind. I had many lessons to learn while living with my family, from integration, to trying to understand gender roles, and Josephine was able to help me through this. She listened, and let me vent, explain, yell and cry, and then eventually realize that I could get through it. She pushed me to always be looking for a lesson to learn, and a means to improve what I was doing. She never pointed out a solution unless I was feeling utterly hopeless. She fostered a learning environment for me, that made this whole experience more valuable than I had ever thought. She was role model for me when it came to issues relating to gender and development, and was an incredible valuable resource for stories, information and suggestions to further learning.
Since I have returned to Canada, there have been many challenges for me. Some have been harder than what I encountered overseas. Living the way I did and with the people I met has changed me and my lifestyle here. By no means have I shifted to an extreme way of life, that would change all of my relationships with people in my life and how I go about my day to day life, but I have become a better critical thinker, reflector and found ways to deal with frustration and decision making in a more constructive way, skills which Josephine helped foster. I am able to explain to family and friends why I make the choices I do, and how I see the world and the way I interact with it. I believe that making small changes in my life, like buying fair trade products, supporting local vendors and trying to be as environmentally and social responsible as possible, I lead by example and challenge others around me to learn and strive to know and grow.
Another initiative that Josephine was very influential in helping me achieve was securing a grant to run a workshop for the women farmer groups I worked with this summer. Through the D4 Innovation Fund, a grant program run by EWB, I was able to, with the help and guidance of Josephine and my Ghanaian coworkers, organize a day of information sharing and learning with 20 women from various villages and also government officials from the Ghanaian Ministry of Food and Agriculture. We created ways to learn and share information about post-harvest storage for a variety of crops, through photos and small groups that worked with learning that did not revolve around writing and reading, since the women were all illiterate. This project would not have been a success without the support from Josephine.
I am very thankful for the opportunity to have gotten to know and work with Josephine. She is an incredible women and someone I will always hold as a role model. No matter what she does in life, she will hit the ground running. She will work to improve every success she has to make it even better and she will learn from every mistake to critically analyze it to see how she can strive to do better next time. She will always look for a challenge and push others around her to do the same. I am lucky to count someone as strong and dynamic as a friend.
Sincerely yours,
Stephanie Power
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