Written by Canadian SportWORKS Officer, Gabe Podivinsky
Good bye Kenya
Gabe’s international experiential learning experience is funded by the Queen Elizabeth Scholars (QES) Program. This collaborative initiative is made possible through the leadership of the Rideau Hall Foundation, in collaboration with Community Foundations of Canada, Universities Canada, and Canadian universities. Through its promotion of international student exchange and civic engagement, the QES program is helping to grow young Canadians into global citizens while promoting Canada as a destination for the world’s top talent and attracting top talent and international research leaders to Canada.
I would like to begin by thanking everyone at NOCK who was a second family to me and helped welcome me to a loving office. Tony, Carol, Nelly, Babra, Kate, Maya, Jairus, Ian, Joseph, Fiona, Julie, Enock, Simon, Lydia, Sue, Steph, Alphonce, Nixxie, & Gloria. With out all of your support and help, this experience wouldn’t have been half of what it was. You are a tremendous team and I am so grateful to have been a small part during such an exciting time leading up to the Paris Olympic Games.
Also special shout out to some of my best friends I made while abroad. Rhoda and Ken. You’re real ones thank you.
I have been back in Canada for a few weeks now. I haven’t sat down and fully decompressed and reflected on my experience, life keeps moving. I was back Sunday and at work Wednesday. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. You go on these big life changing experiences, but the life you are used to living doesn’t change. Your friends are still there, the dog still wakes you up at 7am. Your bedroom is exactly how you left it. It makes you questions if it was worth it? If everything else is the same in the world around you? Have you changed to change the world for the better? I don’t know. I have a beard, that’s a change. My confidence is back, that’s a change. We rush to find the answers to questions we aren’t even asking yet, the problem with that is when we are shown an answer we won’t be able to recognize it as we aren’t looking for it at that time. My dad wrote a poem in the 80’s when he was travelling. I thought about it a lot while I was travelling myself. I was lost for a long time. I didn’t have a path of passion to follow. Acting as a shell of someone who everyone knew. Through my time at MRU I have grown into a young professional, someone who is accountable. Someone who represents the school. Who has the ability to represent Canada on a global scale through community development in Africa. The thing that held me back was doubt. I didn’t believe in myself. I couldn’t because I had given up on my identity when I quit football. I didn’t have a plan and did not know how to approach failure. But it was part of the journey, we get so hung up on the destination we have to be able to take a step back and say “so be it”. It’s hard to do. But it brings so much peace to be happy with where you are in the moment.
I have had the same conversation with about everyone since I have gotten back about the trip. But the frustrating thing about it is that it is difficult to explain the full scope of the experience. It is something that I am so proud of accomplishing, it is something that I have so much pride in beginning and finishing. It is also something that tested my patience and forced me to grow even if I wasn’t ready. I was a student of MRU but also anthropologically as well, studying the culture of Kenya and making continuous comparisons and observations to my own life back home. When you go abroad you are fully thinking about the end goal’s of what you want this trip to mean, the set up, the impact and the lasting legacy that you will have while you are working. But the truth is you cannot have any of that as the experience is so different that what your expectations of it are meant to be.
Sitting back here in Calgary writing this final blog I feel a pride of what I have accomplished. I have travelled to a part of the world which I never thought I would have and I have built myself into a proud young man before entering my final year of school. This project and opportunity through Mount Royal University, Commonwealth Sport Canada, the Queen Elizabeth Scholars Program and the National Olympic Committee of Kenya is something that will hopefully continue to grow long after I leave campus. Knowing that I was the start of a global partnership in sport is a cool feeling. I am grateful. Honestly, this final one is the hardest to write, maybe because once it is done it is officially over? But I think it is because there is so much I want to be able to discuss, my mind has a new perspective which it hadn’t before. Now I am able to sit with my thoughts and while I can’t do that all in this post, I am able to use the learnings and lessons from the experience as I apply them to the practical world of working in sport. I have joined a community of global leaders looking to expand access and resources for all, while making a small difference in my brief time abroad. The trip was a small time compared to the impact I can make over my career, that is just beginning. I’m happy. I love my life and the path that I have taken, my dad would be proud.
I don’t really have much else to say truthfully. I am so satisfied with the experience both the good and the bad. It was something that I had to do and am proud that I did. Thank you to everyone for following along in these blogs and being a part of the journey.
One final super slide show
Cheers,
Gabe Podivinsky