This final week has been one of mixed emotions. While I am looking forward to going home and seeing my family again, I will truly miss lots of people I have met here in Peru, not least the Comunidad team, my fellow scholars, and the community in Cantagallo who welcomed us with open arms. While we haven't quite managed to finish everything we set out to do, I am quietly confident that in this past six weeks we have exchanged ideas, inspiration, and resources to a most positive effect.
Personally, I have learnt a lot about my own working and leadership styles, my personal values, the importance of honest communication, and the taking of personal responsibility. We owed it not just to ourselves, but to everyone involved to do our utmost while we were here.
When presenting our work to the other scholars and organizations at our closing ceremony we focused on the more concrete deliverables of our project - we delivered over 500 meals over a 4 week period, introduced various food substitutes in an effort to begin lowering anaemia rates, created a comprehensive international funding directory, as well as connecting some women artisans of the Shipibo community with more sustainable business opportunities and providing the community kitchen staff with a salary for the duration of our programme. While these outcomes are arguably the most important consequences of our time here in Lima, I was most impacted by the relationships formed and knowledge shared amongst ourselves as scholars and with the amazing volunteers and professionals we have met. Sharing our experience, our ideas around best practice, and simply our passion for social development really impressed upon me the fundamentally human drive and hope we shared when talking about and working toward creating a better future for our respective communities.
In the immediate aftermath of my time in Peru, I am so grateful to take home with me the warmth and sense of communal care that I was privy to witness between the team at Comunidad Peru and the children and artisans living in Cantagallo. They truly embody the meaning of radical and holistic care in their work and it will never cease to inspire me. They have provided to me a model of how I want to move through the world in future. Their ethos informed by love and guided by compassion further fuels my wish to do right by others and ourselves as we come to the end of our time in undergraduate and ready ourselves for our next steps.