A Blog from Travis

We are taking a break from your usual bloggers for a guest post.  I am Travis, the team’s travel mentor, and I have spent the last week with Nikki and Curtis here in Rwanda.  Did you know that deep in the book of EWB regulations, there is a little known section that obligates travel mentors to write mid-trip evaluations of the students they travel with and post it on the internet for all to see?  It’s true.  You can look it up if you don’t believe me.

Let us begin with Curtis.  The good: he is thoughtful, observant, and a logical thinker.  He often walks so fast that he is forced to stop and wait for the rest of the group to catch up.  The bad: he never stops to wait in the shade.  He is always stopping in a patch of bright, hot sunlight.  For an otherwise intelligent young man, this is a curious thing as the African sun rarely offers relief when you are already hot.  Also, he once said I was “looking a lot like a bureaucrat” because I was sitting while he and Nikki worked to survey a water site.  In theory, this is insulting and I should have docked points for it, but I was too busy sipping cool water and relaxing in the shade to follow through.

On to Nikki.  The good: she is organized, caring, and passionate about the work we are doing here.  She is great with the kids, and eternally optimistic.  The bad: she does not throw things with great accuracy.  You are probably reading this and thinking this trait is not really a bad thing, and normally I would agree with you.  But it turns out that when you are standing on top of a 10-foot tall water tank and she is the only one available to throw a bucket up, her execution of the toss is fairly limiting.

Together, they are energetic, motivated, and bright and when they are on top of the world, I hope they will recall their experience in Rwanda as instructive and worthwhile.  In large part, of course, because of all the stories I told them that started with, “Let me tell you what it was like when I was your age…”