The volunteer
Author and journalist Joan Baxter is returning to Africa, where she will continue to play a vital role as a volunteer with the Nova Scotia Gambia Association
Joan Baxter is insatiably nosy. "That's why Africa is the perfect place for me," says the former executive director of the Halifax–based Nova Scotia Gambia Association (NSGA). "There is something new to learn every single day."
That being said, her recent stint with the NSGA (www.novascotiagambia.ca) brought Baxter moments of exhilaration that alternated with apprehension. "Can we pay the salaries at the end of the month? Is there going to be time to write those reports to donors? I was the chief financial officer, human resources, general manager, communications officer—all at the same time," says Baxter, a native of Dartmouth, N.S., who spent 22 years in Africa working as an author, journalist, and anthropologist. "I learned more this year managing an NGO than I ever would have in 20 years watching from the sidelines."
Baxter first went to Niger in 1982 as a young media studies graduate of the University of King's College in Halifax. Africa ended up becoming home. "I was married there, and our children grew up in Africa," she says. "There is a magic there that you can't explain."
Baxter recently resigned from the NSGA in order to resume her writing career and to return to Sierra Leone, where her husband heads a development project for food security and peace reconciliation. From 1993 to 1997, she was a science writer for the World Agroforestry Centre and a journalist for the BBC World Service and Associated Press. She also contributed to Canadian media, including CBC Radio, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and The Chronicle-Herald. Baxter has been writing a non-fiction book for the last three years, which is tentatively titled As the Library Burns: The Theft of Africa's Wealth and Wisdom and is scheduled for publication in October of 2008. Baxter will continue working with the NSGA as a volunteer, in the Sierra Leone office and on a new project that will involve doing mass education on HIV/AIDS prevention and HIV voluntary testing and counselling.
"I was married in Africa, and our children grew up there," says Joan Baxter. "There's a magic that you can't explain.".
Baxter's experience has given her a "substantial understanding of and feeling for the people of West Africa, the nature of international development work, and of our work, which is working on the ground with people in a sustainable way," says Margaret-Anne Bennett, NSGA's board chair. "We will miss her enthusiastic leadership, but Joan had a very successful year in leading the organization through a time of transition."
The NSGA was created in 1989 by Brian Devanney, an English teacher at Halifax West high school, and a group of five volunteers, three of whom were also teachers. Today the organization works with all age groups, although its focus is still on the health and education of young people. The peer-education program focuses on many health issues, including AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, sexually transmitted infections, healthy relationships, food and nutrition, and gender equity.
The NSGA has expanded out of The Gambia and into Sierra Leone, which endured a horrific decade-long war that ended in 2002. The organization went into Sierra Leone immediately after the war. "In many places, schools had been closed for over a decade," says Baxter. "There was no formal education. Lots of communities didn't even know that HIV exists."
Nova Scotia is well known in The Gambia because of the work of the NSGA. "The historical link between Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone is well known," says Baxter, who points out that black Loyalists from Nova Scotia founded the capital of Freetown in 1792, led by a man called Thomas Peters. "When we move around The Gambia in an NSGA vehicle, people shout, 'Nova Scotia!,' which they know from their own history."
The connection and concern Nova Scotians feel for West Africa is palpable.
"It is an absolutely wonderful feeling," says Baxter. "People here care about the work the NSGA is doing and they want to make a difference. Some Nova Scotian children even donated their Christmas gifts to help. When that happened, I got chills."
— Carol Moreira
