Soon after arriving in Africa, Trish Anderson '98 visited the home of a woman whose husband had died recently of AIDS and who herself had AIDS. The woman warmly invited Anderson in for tea and corn on the cob by the fire.
"She cares for about 20 orphans," Anderson explains. "She assembled them all, and they performed a song and dance for me that they had written about AIDS and water. It's a beautiful culture in the way that they combine art and music and dance with important messages. It was their way of saying, 'We appreciate your being here.'"
Such moments keep Anderson going - and - the fact that she loves a challenge. She has combined her passions for knotty problems, adventure travel and social and environmental justice by diving into one of the planet's murkiest issues - access to clean water. Since last summer, Anderson has lived in Kenya's Nyanza Province, serving as coordinator for the Atlanta Rotary Club's Safe Water Project.
Beneath her cropped, sandy hair, Anderson's unwavering gaze conveys her focused attention. Her lanky, athletic build and firm jaw suggest a warrior-like ability to thrive in adversity. She chooses her words carefully - a skill no doubt honed in a life full of encounters with many different kinds of people.
"My parents were good about exposing us to all kinds of living," says the New Jersey native reared in Dunwoody, Ga. "It was common for us tow ork in soup kitchens and with the poor, and my mother was involved in the St. Vincent dePaul Society. It made for a rich childhood."
A service trip to Kingston, Jamaica, during high school opened Anderson's eyes to a literal world of possibilities. "We worked with the elderly and the sick and teh AIDS population, and we built homes and worked with kids in school. I had never had an experience like this. It was not just working with the poor, but really with different cultures," she says. "I was intrigued by it. I had a feeling that international development was the course I would go down. I'm an American, but I really have always seen myself as part of this amazing human race."
At Agnes Scott a few years later, religion professor Tina Pippin's class on "Feminism, Cultural Criticism, and Religion" sent Anderson, an anthropology major, further down that course. Ilse Cohen of the American Friends Service Committee in Atlanta guest-lectured in the class. "Cohen put together an amazing study tour for us," Anderson says of the trip that took her through Jordan, Egypt and Israel.
"Our entry was sitting in on an all-women's university in Amman, Jordan. We interviewed somebody at the newspaper about honor crimes there, talked with refugees, talked with someone from a liberation theology organization. In Israel, we met with a women's peace organization, went to the Knesset, and the last day talked with a diplomat from the U.S. Embassy, and we were ready to ask really hard questions. I was hooked - hooked intellectually on the complexity of race, religion, politics and socioeconomic status, but I also loved the adventure."
- From the Spring 2006 Agnes Scott Alumnae Magazine |
