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13 August
Tomorrow I'll be leaving Mazembeni for the final time this summer/winter, and it's the 49th night since the first night we slept in this house. Seven weeks in the village was long enough for us to have made some close friends, and to feel sadness upon leaving all these people behind to return to our normal lives in places far more wealthy ( Read more... ) -
Thoughts on development
Friday August 3-6, 2012
All of my thoughts on the different approaches and philosophies of development have come and gone, lighting up sporadically in my head throughout the day, and so I feel that I must type them out to grasp and collect all that I've gathered through my work and experiences here, and everything else that I've read or heard or ( Read more... ) -
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One week from today, I'd have left Mazembeni for the final time this summer and also left behind all the incredible people that have formed an important part of the seven weeks in community. It seems unreal that only a week is left, and I wonder how I'll feel when I get back to the modern world and all its conveniences and time-filling aspects. ( Read more... ) -
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I'm staying at a lodge for our last excursion to Kruger National Park, so I took the opportunity to post this entry I wrote for the ThinkImpact blog. There are more entries I've written but I forgot to bring them on my thumbdrive so I'll probably post them after leaving the village. Yesterday was great - saw lots of giraffes, elephants and buffalos ( Read more... ) -
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I've been cooking a lot since coming here, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it helps me make the most of the limited variety of fresh food here (and our once every two week grocery stop when we have an excursion). The only fresh foods for sale in the village are potatoes, cabbages, tomatoes, avocados, bread (doesn't really count), eggs and ( Read more... ) -
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Things have been going well with life in the village and with my team. Yesterday we were all free because a lot of team members had to go for a funeral, so we all gathered at my homestay and cooked lunch together - fish fillets that Kyle bought during the last excursion panfried with breadcrumbs, garlic, a sweet lemon picked from the yard and ( Read more... ) -
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Had my first design team meeting today, and it turned out quite well! Our group of six students has split up into 3 groups and we've each chosen 4 to 6 community members to join our respective design teams. In a little more than 3 weeks, we're going to work together to identify a problem to focus on, define a 'how might we' question that links the ( Read more... ) -
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I reached my cellphone's text limit in the previous post so here's a continuation ( Read more... ) -
Water
Over the past few days we've been exploring the village more and interviewing specific people to discover the important assets and problems in the village. It's the last few days of the Immersion phase (ThinkImpact jargon) where we gather information on the village, and soon we'll transit to the Inspiration phase which means more involvement of ( Read more... )