They came from different parts of North America, with different backgrounds and interests, but the experiences that Roxanne de Graaf Addink and Janet Phillips (nee Vliegenthart) would share over a two year period in Kenya 23 years ago would unite them for life. “It is a bond that keeps us connected when our work spans the globe, when we’ve faced tough times, or just when we celebrate the small joys of children and life,” explained Roxanne.
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They came from different parts of North America, with different backgrounds and interests, but the experiences that Roxanne de Graaf Addink and Janet Phillips (nee Vliegenthart) would share over a two year period in Kenya 23 years ago would unite them for life.
“It is a bond that keeps us connected when our work spans the globe, when we’ve faced tough times, or just when we celebrate the small joys of children and life,” explained Roxanne.
The women were two of the eight young people originally selected to be part of CRWRC’s international internship program in 1989, the year the program launched.
“I studied business and economics at Calvin College and started to focus on understanding and finding sustainable solutions to end poverty,” said Roxanne. “In my senior year I had signed up for Peace Corps, but then heard about CRWRC’s new two-year internship program. The opportunity to be mentored and more freely integrate my faith in the development work with CRWRC’s internship program attracted me.”
“I grew up in the Reformed Church of America in Canada but had a lot of friends and family in the CRC,” added Janet. “At that time I had never heard of CRWRC but a friend of my Mom’s told her about the new internship program that CRWRC had announced. During my schooling at the University of Guelph, I had done a summer mission in Burkina Faso with SIM and I knew that after graduation I wanted to go back to Africa for a longer period. While I was pretty sure I wanted to work with a Christian organization, I wanted to work in development, not in evangelism or church-planting.”
Each woman applied to CRWRC in the summer of 1988 and then waited to find out if they would be accepted. Five months later, they had the first of several interviews. In early 1989 they, and the other successful candidates, were sent to an intensive three-week orientation in Farmington, Michigan. Roxanne and Janet left for their internship a couple of months later in October of 1989.
“Our CRWRC supervisor, Janne Rittskes, picked us up at the airport. We were tired but too excited to sleep,” Janet recalled. “Kenya was more beautiful, more developed and less foreign that I had expected. I thought my experience in Burkina Faso would somehow prepare me for Kenya but the two places were absolutely so different, that I soon realized I would just embarrass myself to pretend to know something.”
After a few days of orientation and training on various components of community development, the women left the bustling city of Nairobi and were taken to a remote village in Western Kenya about a five hour drive away.
“Roxanne and I were placed with the Christian Community Services program of the Nambale Diocese of the Anglican Church in Kenya. The Nambale Diocese covered a large geographic area – from the lush and cool peaks of Mount Elgon to the hot, dusty shores of Lake Victoria – a distance of about 90 km – all snuggled up against the border with Uganda,” said Janet. “Nambale Diocese had little in terms of a development program. It had a program name, a director, and a few scattered fishponds, tree nurseries and business groups here and there.”
On their tenth day in Kenya, Janne Rittskes returned to Nairobi. She left Janet and Roxanne with some training and some modules for various community development workshops.
“This was 1989. There were no cell phones, no land-line in our house, no computers, no email,” said Janet. “We had a vague plan of action, but we were on our own until Janne would return in a month or so.”
“In the first month of the internship we had no electricity and for much of the two years we had no phone service. It was quite a transition from college to these quiet nights, using kerosene lamps and learning to cook on a coal cookstove,” Roxanne added. “We eventually did get electricity and transitioned to cooking with a toaster oven, though we often just joined the Kenyan family next door for dinner and grew to really love the staples of Western Kenya—chapati, ugali, curried chicken and greens.”
The women quickly got to work. The archdeacon of the diocese gave them some Swahili lessons and introduced them to people in the community. They also each acquired a motorcycle to help them get around.
“They were street bikes, not very well-suited for the mostly dirt roads we would soon get to know very intimately,” said Janet. “The bikes, called piki pikis, were especially bad for the slick red mud of Mount Elgon. The mud would coat the wheels until they would no longer turn. We were a sight – two mzungu (white) girls on their piki-pikis whizzing around to every corner of Nambale Diocese.”
They spent the first year learning modules and then teaching those lessons to women’s groups, savings circles, and other church groups. They incorporated everything from child nutrition and family planning to business accounting and improving agricultural yields. Every lesson integrated a Christian worldview and faith.
“Janet’s background was agriculture and my background was in business, so I spent more time with the small business groups and business curriculum, while Janet focused on food security,” Roxanne explained. “In that first year we often left our house in the morning headed opposite ways in the Diocese on our piki pikis and would spend several hours cycling, and then sometimes hiking further on foot to get to the remote churches and groups with whom we worked.”
“We weighed babies, taught composting, led Bible studies, and started savings and credit groups. We were trained and we trained,” added Janet. “Many a day we traveled two or more hours on our motorcycles, hoping for a group of 20 and finding five. Other days we expected five and found 50. Many evenings we didn’t get home until after dark. We came puttering into the compound, always tired, often wet, usually with some produce strapped to the back of the motorcycle – a pineapple or bag of mangos.”
In the evenings and on weekends, they relaxed and formed the friendship that would span decades. They went to the swimming pool at the local hotel, wrote letters to family, and read any novels they could get their hands on. They also laughed about the mistakes and challenges that they had faced.
“I once taught a class on nutrition and mistakenly talked about the health benefits of eating ndugu (Swahili for brother) rather than njugu (Swahili for peanuts). The whole room broke out laughing,” recalled Roxanne. “Our Kenyan neighbors and coworkers helped us laugh at our mistakes.”
In their second year, they hired and trained 14 community women to take over the program after their internship was complete. According to Janet, the women had no formal education past high-school but a lot of life experience, good basic skills and a perfect mix of commitment, ambition and calling.
“It was a good thing they had lots of life experience because we were a bit lacking in that area,” said Janet. “There we were discussing family planning, childcare, and business development all pretty much from textbooks. These women, on the other hand, had lived these things and really taught us more than we taught them.”
“Those were fun days of building deep relationships with these amazing Kenyan women— walking the paths with them, gaining their insights, leadership, and friendship. Training sessions with these 14 women were often full of laughter, song and creativity. At the same time, as we deepened our relationships, we also saw more clearly the barriers for women in, the long-standing tribal tensions, the emergence of the HIV-AIDS crisis, corruption at many levels, and the fact that this agrarian society was getting crowded on its land in the midst of a difficult economic, social, and political transition,” Roxanne added.
Eventually, the community women were given bicycles and sent out to the villages on their own to weigh babies, teach composting, and facilitate business groups.
“At the end of not quite two years, the Nambale Diocese had a development program that was the envy of other nearby dioceses. It was having good results and was almost completely run by locals,” said Janet. “These women accomplished so much more than we ever could have, even if we stayed twenty years.”
“The Christian Community Services community development program that we saw the birth of continues to this day, and became a national model for the Anglican Church in Kenya,” added Roxanne. “Several of the women we trained have continued in their leadership roles in community development. One has even built her own community-based non-profit, which is now serving the HIV and AIDS-affected families and children at the base of Mt. Elgon.”
The experience also shaped Roxanne and Janet. Roxanne went on to graduate school in Iowa and studied urban planning. Her internship experiences helped her when she did community planning in Northern New Mexico.
“The growth of the Christian Community Services program was built on the social capital, the networks, and talents of the people and resources of the Nambale Diocese of the Anglican church. I brought this experience and these values to build bridges and forge partnerships in my ten years of work as a town and economic development planner in Taos, New Mexico,” she said.
Today, she leads strategic initiatives for Partners Worldwide, a global network of businesspeople who are growing businesses and creating jobs to pursue their vision of “business as ministry for a world without poverty.”
“As an organization that grew out of CRWRC’s work, Partner Worldwide shares a lot of the core development values and principles that were part of my internship with CRWRC. I am now dialoguing with a global team, business volunteers, and interns on issues of local ownership, resources, talents, and sustainability that I learned during my internship,” she said.
Janet spent nearly 13 of the next 21 years working for CRWRC. She returned to Nambale Diocese three years later for a six-month assignment, managed a rehabilitation project following the war and genocide in Rwanda, and served as Regional Relief Coordinator for CRWRC’s international disaster response team in East and Southern Africa. While she left the position after having a baby, she continued to do some writing for CRWRC. She just completed almost three years working with Religions for Peace, a global interfaith network.
“Whenever I hear young people talking about their careers or their future, I strongly encourage them to take a bit of time and work overseas or at least travel. The perspective they gain on how the rest of the world lives in comparison to their own privileges will stick with them forever. Not every intern will stay with CRWRC or go back overseas but you can bet that wherever they go in their lives, they take that experience with them and it influences their choices,” she said.
Other CRWRC interns agree.
“The CRWRC internship was a great jumping off point for us, allowing us the opportunity to experience the complexity of community development – its joys and struggles,” said Matt VanGeest, who interned in Senegal in 1999 and 2000 with his wife, Esther. He now works in Haiti the International Organization for Migration as a Program Manager. “Our time in Senegal helped us understand the absolute importance of community voices in determining their own future. Twelve years later, we still come back to moments, people, memories that were made during that year in Senegal. It would be fair to say that the overall experience pushed us deeper into our commitment to social justice and working alongside others to try to make this world a little more Kingdom-like.”
Joel Lautenbach spent 10 months in Malawi with CRWRC in 2006 and 2007 and now works for CRWRC in their Grand Rapids office in the Donor Relations department.
“I understand now how important it is to view those seen as beneficiaries of our work as men and women with dignity. Whether here in North America or around the world, all people have something to offer in the process of change. When it comes to culture, different isn't necessarily right or wrong, it's just different,” he said. “I also learned that God answers prayer directly and there is more going on spiritually in our physical surroundings than our western culture often leads us to believe,” he said.
“The free and frequent access to leaders who were living out a vision for how we all could be daily participants in the building of the Kingdom of God, right here and right now, helped to mold my framework for understanding how people of faith could exercise their faith in ways that had relevant impact in places of poverty and hurt and isolation,” added Sarah Rinsema-Sybenga, who served with CRWRC in Muskegon, Michigan from 2003-2005. She is now the Executive Director of a Christian Community Development Organization in Downtown Muskegon. “In many ways, it was through the experience with CRWRC, that I found back my place in the church.”
Since 1989, CRWRC has sent 27 interns overseas for paid international internship positions. The program has also been modified. While these internships continue to be modeled after the original version, there are now several types including International Youth Internship Program internships funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), self-funded internships, and internships affiliated with a college or university for school credit. To find out more, contact Iona Buisman (Canada) or Mary Dykstra (US).
As for Roxanne and Janet, their friendship continues even though they now live in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Brooklyn, New York respectively. Their annual (or more frequent) get-togethers have included weddings, pregnancies, family get-togethers and weekends just for the two of them including one memorable reunion in July 1997 when they met again in Nambale Diocese at the home of the archdeacon’s family they had come to love. Roxanne came from Nairobi and Janet came from Kigali. They ate ugali and greens and laughed about those motorcycles, and celebrated God’s goodness in their lives.