In September 2007, only days after my long journey from the Yukon Territory, Canada safely terminated in Grahamstown South Africa, I made another long trip.

In the white LRC buggy, I traveled with two colleagues through much of the Eastern Cape province to the rolling hills and rondavels of the Transkei to meet with a small group of concerned citizens who called themselves the Amadiba Crisis Committee. As meetings go, this one was terribly disorganized. Members of the ACC were not available at the scheduled time and no one could even tell us the location of the meeting. We sat for nearly two hours at the side of the road in Mbzana, watching the locals bustle past. When we finally met with the ACC it quickly became apparent that I was the only one taking "minutes" of the meeting, notwithstanding that I was the only one who spoke not a word of isiXhosa, the African language in which the entire meeting was conducted. An hour later we were on our way back to Grahamstown, me wondering how I would fit into this strange new world.

I have always loved travel, even before I left my childhood home on Vancouver Island. My father was the consummate traveler, having traveled much of the globe before Lonely Planet was a gleam in a publisher's eye, and I was raised on tales of his wanderings. Living in a foreign country not only exposes you to the culture and lifestyle of others, but holds up a mirror in which parts of oneself can be seen more clearly, sometimes for the first time. The experience offers both an opportunity to learn new skills and a testing ground for old ones. It provides space to ask that most personal of questions "who am I now?"

My year at the LRC has given me many unexpected gifts, the foremost being the opportunity to work with Sarah Sephton, who has taught me more about legal strategy and dogged persistence than she probably knows. I hope that the lessons I have learned and continue to learn at the LRC in Grahamstown will fuel my future legal work and studies and that when I look in the mirror in other places and at other times I will see them reflected back at me somehow. Equally, I hope that the cases that I have contributed to while at the LRC fuel change in the lives of our clients and that they will receive the help they need to assert their rights.

This September, almost a year to the day, I returned to the Transkei to meet again with the ACC and attend a community meeting with the Minister of Minerals and Energy. The changes were palpable. We all piled into the white LRC vehicle, which I now know to be a "bakkie", and drove for a full day to a meeting with people whose names were now familiar. When I finally met one of our clients, who I had previously only known through email and telephone, I received a genuine smile and a big hug. We talked strategy all evening and drove together to a community the following day. No longer disorganized and uncertain, the ACC and the community it represents were cohesive, passionate and determined. One did not have to be fluent in isiXhosa to recognize the outrage they expressed to the Minister. It seems that we have all grown together in the last year. Of course, I still took the minutes.

- by Kim Hawkins (September 2007)