Basketball Tigers making an impact ‑ Part II

Our second in a two-part story focuses on Emily Hanaka who was recently in Kenya, Africa for two and a half weeks with an organization called C.L.O.U.D. (Changing Lives through Opportunities and Unified Dreams).

Emily is a Hamilton, Ontario native who just finished her first year with the Tigers. She first went on a mission trip in December of 2011 with D.R.E.A.M.S. (Dominican Republic Education and Medical Services), with her high school in Hamilton, Ontario.

Here she tells us how she got to Kenya…

In December of 2012 almost a year after my first trip, I finally decided to contact the CEO of the New World Community, Jay Mahoney, to try and make a change once more. The New World Community is a non-profit organization, which has created a program called C.L.O.U.D. This program has been designed to allow groups of students from universities from across Ontario to send groups of students to either the Dominican Republic or Haiti to participate in a volunteer-based mission trip. Hearing about this program I knew I had to bring the club to Dalhousie to allow us East Coasters the chance to make a difference. Jay was thrilled to hear that I wanted to lead the program out east and proceeded to tell me about his plans to take a trip to Kenya to work out some logistics in order to have Kenya as an option of travel for university students. He then extended the invitation to me allowing me to accompany him for two and half weeks. Without thinking about the decision I was about to make I agreed to take part in this adventure with him. The purpose of our trip was to visit an Internally Displaced Peoples camp in a small village outside of Naivasha, Kenya.

The village we were working with was home to over 300 people (200 of them being women and children), who had been chased out of their homes after the post-election violence in 2007. The people of this village had been living with eight people to a straw hut for the last four years. All of which had to literally run for their lives leaving behind their homes, personal belongings, deceased family and friends and old lives. The people of this village had been living on less than 50 cents a day, and in extreme poverty with zero basic necessities. We were able to fundraise prior to going on the trip and raised roughly $6,000 to provide the village with a “sanitization room” which included three toilets and three bathrooms along with soap and clean water. We were not only able to provide the funds and materials to do so we were able to build the outhouse with the villagers while visiting. The most amazing part of building this structure was that it was constructed of soil and plastic water bottles. The water bottles were collected from a landfill in Kenya, and then filled will sand to become a brick like structure. Not only is it cost-effective, it helps address the fast-growing economic issue of littering in Kenya. We were able to spend a significant amount of time with the people of the “Hope IDP camp” and show them that the bright light at the end of the tunnel is finally approaching. The future projects in Kenya will remain in this camp, however the new goal is to build new homes and a sustainable source of food and income.

Despite all of the hardships these amazing people have already faced and will continue to come across, the smiles and high energy possessed by each and every one of them is remarkable. Although we were hard at work primarily working with the Hope IDP camp, we were able to squeeze in time to speak to students at a local elementary school and a high school in a troubled area about how important it is to continue one’s education. We also had the opportunity to go visit two other communities that used to be living in similar living conditions as the Hope IDP camp that had turned their lives around by learning new trades and making and selling crafts to tourists. I was able to receive so much more from these people in the communities and from the students then I could have ever given them. We were seen as an inspiration to all of these people. Little did they know the stories and hardships they shared with us brought me to tears on a daily basis and was more inspiring then anything I have ever experienced. They treated me like I was a member of the family, even giving me a name in Swahili, Njeri (smiles). We laughed, hugged, and cried on our last day dreading the farewell.

I do not want people thinking all we did was work, we also took part in a four-hour safari in Nakuru National Park, swung from vines over a cliff, climbed down to a Kenyan waterfall, went on a boating hippo safari, saw one of the largest craters in the world, went on a walking safari where we got to walk around with 12 different species of animals, and visited the Kibera slums, in Nairobi, home to over 750,000 people. Which led to an overall amazing trip.

When someone goes on a trip like this everyone says “it changed my life.” But honestly as cliché as it is, it truly does change your life. Since I have been home, all I can think about is the people of the Hope IDP camp, and wonder how their futures are going to look. It brings me to tears every time I discuss the trip with other people because I just long to go back and help these people again. I am now the East Coast ambassador for C.L.O.U.D. projects and the president of C.L.O.U.D. at Dalhousie. We have started reaching out to the student body and coming up with fundraising ideas for our trip we plan to take in April 2014 to Haiti to volunteer. I cannot wait to see what the Dal student body can do to make a difference!