Camps International Project Diary

Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Return of The Volunteer

August 26th, 2010 by Mel

One of The Best things in our line of work at Camps is the people we meet. People who makes the effort to travel thousands of miles away and volunteer to make a difference. NINA CAPEK, came out to Borneo a year ago this month and she explains it here, on her return….

This time last year I spent an amazing 2 weeks living and volunteering in the Bornean Village of Kipouvo and exactly one year on I came back to pay them a surprise visit! As a teacher in the UK, and a very keen traveller, I am always looking for new and exciting ways to spend my summer. As soon as I heard about the Camps International community project in Borneo I knew it was something I wanted to do.

Having done a little research I thought I had some idea of what life in the village of Kipouvo may be like but these ideas were totally shadowed by the amazing experiences I had and people I met. I could write pages and pages on my time in the village and even then I couldn’t really do my experience justice so for the purpose of this blog I Will keep it short and let your imaginations (or even first hand experiences) fill in the rest!

People always say that first impressions are the most important and that they are usually accurate and in this case those people are certainly not wrong. As we arrived and drove through the village we were greeted by friendly waves and lots of ‘Hello’s from all the locals, I will never forget Rory’s van struggling to drive up the hill towards the newly built house that was to be our home for the next few weeks, and seeing Regina, Betty, Camila and Boy waiting to great us. Despite the obvious language barriers the welcome we received was so warm and genuine it was obvious we were going to be very well looked after.

Over the course of my stay I was honoured to be accepted as a member of the Kipouvo community, I joined the villagers at church, for a village clean up day (gotong royong) involving lots of people from local villages and numerous other party parties! All the villagers were very respectful of our need for privacy but after a few days some of the barriers were broken down and it became the norm for us all to eat together and to spend the evenings laughing, playing games and drinking Tiger beer and the local rice wine. I can honestly say I have never spent so much time laughing as I did with the wonderful ladies of Kipouvo.

As well as becoming a source of entertainment to the locals I would like to think we also did some good in terms of the work we did. Our projects involved teaching, helping out in the school canteen, ‘helping?!!’ rubber tap trees and clearing the paths in the herb garden but our biggest projects were painting a mural in the pre-school (see photo) and building a road to make passing over the river running through the centre of the village easier for cars and vans to pass. The work was not always easy but with the volunteers and locals working side by side the ‘work’ days were just as much fun as the ‘non-work’ days.

The night before our group left, the village threw us one of the best parties I have ever been to. The whole village turned up to see us off; there was food, rice wine, dancing (see photo) and tears late into the night. After the project was over and the group had returned to KK we couldn’t leave for home without seeing all our new friends one last time so we decided to host a day at the beach. I will never forget the smiles and the giggles as 14 people piled out of a small mini van laden with bags and food. For some of the children it was their first ever visit to the beach and they, like us, loved every minute of it. On returning from the beach the villagers all piled back into the van and lots of tears and waving later they headed back to Kipouvo.

Three months on Mel (from camp Borneo) was visiting the UK and I have invited her to come stay with me for a few days. It was great to see her and try to re-pay some of the Bornean hospitality. When she produced letters from the village it was so exciting to hear the latest news from Kipouvo and to know that we had not been forgotten.

And now……. I am siting in the Camp Borneo office having just visited Kipouvo exactly one year on. This summer I was attending a wedding in Malaysia and there was no way I could pass up the opportunity to visit the wonderful people of Borneo. With the help of Mel and Regina we managed to arrange a surprise visit back to the beach for some of the Kipouvo residents. Most of the villagers had no idea that I was back and I was totally overwhelmed by the reception I received when the 13 adults and 3 children (who had all piled into the mini van for the 30 minute trip to the jetty) saw me. I was greated with hugs and tears like a long lost member of the Kipouvo family. We had a fantastic day of laughing, photos, swimming and food on the beach and even survived the boat journey back to KK despite the rain, infact it just led to more sounds of giggles echoing through the boat.

That evening I headed back to Kipouvo with the villagers and couldn’t wait to see if anything had changed since my last visit. As I drove through the village it was like I had never left, the first thing I noticed was our carefully crafted road, unfortunately it had not really survived a heavy truck passing over it but it was still better than it had been when I originally arrived. Driving past the pre-school it was great to see that our art work (including our hand prints) was still there to b enjoyed by the children and their teachers. Arriving back at the homestay it was like returning home, the rooms, the welcoming smells, the balcony where I had spent hours playing cards and drinking with the locals and even the house cat ‘Meow Meow’ were all so familiar.

I was really pleased to see that a few minor changes had taken place, most noticable were the plants that were scattered all around the grounds and the arrival of a large white board to aid teaching. As the evening wore on and rumour of my return got around more and more members of the community braved the rain and could be heard shouting ‘Nina, Nina’ as they ran up the hill to see me!

As we sat eating, playing games and drinking rice wine I was so pleased to see that all the villagers (including the cat) were just the same as they had been a year ago but the one change that struck me most was the way their confidence had grown. where as before conversations had been slightly stilted due to a concern about the accuracy of their English, now everyone was happy to join in conversations, crack jokes and even be more than slightly willing to take the micky out of me!

As I drove away from the village the next morning I was left in no doubt that everyone would be just fine and that one day, whether they like it or not, I would be back!

Love

Nina

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Changing the Climate with Camps

October 16th, 2009 by dipesh

The world knows that something is desperately wrong with the climate these days and it’s top of the agenda for global leaders and policy makers. This year thousands of bloggers came together yesterday to bring together a global voice for action to be taken against Climate Change. In Kenya, we don’t have to be told – we can see it and feel it. Two years of drought followed by El Nino floods in parts of the country. Phrases like carbon footprint and offsetting carbon have become for many a part of our daily lingo. Thankfully it is not all doom and gloom (at least not in our generation), as the rains have finally arrived…but it is certainly a wake-up call to all.

Where we are at

The bottom-line is we can all do our bit and we at Camps would like to think that we are taking a road less traveled. We have been planting trees for years thanks to all our volunteers who share our mission for being responsible travelers. Recently, we have been trying to take it one step further. At Camp Borneo, the team has been busy building a prototype bio gas collector (yes, there is a whole lot of energy that comes out of rear ends!)

And in Kenya, we have had a long standing relationship with WWF to protect local forests and support alternative ways for communities to create an income without having to cut trees down. It’s not enough to tell people not to cut trees when they can barely feed themselves and we understand this. The local Farmer’s Center at Muhaka has become a buzz of activities for finding alternative eco-friendly fuels like jatropha as a biofuel to replace paraffin at homes (afraid there aint no electricity around here!) and now we are well underway with piloting our organic charcoal briquette project:

Where we are going

But we still know that there is so much more we can do and we want to do. So when some friendly chaps from a company called CO2balance came knocking at the door, we were quite excited to learn about the various projects they support across the world to find sustainable and financially viable ways for individuals to massive corporates to offset their carbon footprint. And right in our own backyard!

Best to let them explain what this is all about…

co2balance is working with local social groups in the Ukunda region of Kenya, East Africa to replace the use of open fires for cooking with energy efficient cooking stoves. Our energy efficient stoves are made entirely in East Africa and utilise the ‘Rocket stove’ technology which offers a good balance between cost, life expectancy and efficiency. These stoves reduce firewood consumption by half and save in the region of 3.05 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year, 15.25 tonnes over the 5 year life span, in comparison to traditional cooking methods.

In addition to the saving in greenhouse gas emissions, the reduced need for firewood and the burning of rubbish leads to a corresponding reduction in the amount of time spent collecting cooking fuel. The recipients of the energy efficient technology also gain considerable co-benefits such as reduced costs and a considerably improved environment from a health and safety perspective.

This is another example of co2balance seeking projects with a wide range of additional benefits to the receiving community, including health, financial, social and environmental. In this way, we can maximise the project’s achievements beyond simple carbon saving.

(If you would like to read more about this particular project, click HERE)

The ball began to roll a few months ago when CO2balance was keen to get a fuel-efficient stove program going in and around the Tsavo ecosystem so we helped to arrange various meetings with key community leaders like our good friends at Imani Women’s Group. In a couple of months over 400 stoves were built at individual homes and there are plans for another 1200!

As Ruphence (above) states: “This is a great stove. It works very good and very fast. Now I only use 2 k of charcoal when I was using 5. I can cook my beans and my ugali very quickly, so there is always food ready and none of my customers have to wait. They are all saying that Ruphence has the best café here and they are right. I have a good stove and I love it very much. I hope that I can get another one because then I can make this place bigger. It is a very very good project. I want to say Asante sana (thank you very much) to co2balance”.

What we can all do

For those of you that travel with us, you all know that our projects come first and foremost (ok, ok and a bit of fun too!) and thus, we have every intention of working with CO2balance to build as many stoves for communities that we work with in Kenya to start with so there is a lot to look forward to next year. But we want to take this one step further and do realise that taking responsibility starts at the very beginning of the journey if not before and whilst we will be busy planting many more trees, building stoves and bio-gas collectors, we would like to offer anyone who wants to, the option to offset their carbon from air travel. The journey starts at home and we hope that this will be a road more travelled…