In 2012 Anne Chapman (centre) finished her Palms placement in Atabae, Timor-Leste, working alongside local staff. This May she went back to visit.
She had managed to stay in touch with one former student. She went for a walk into town hoping she might find someone she knew. A neighbour took her to the house of a former counterpart. Nobody was expecting her.
“The shock! The tears! The joy and the non-stop hugs were amazing,” she wrote to us afterwards.
Word travelled fast. There was a dinner for twenty that night at a new restaurant in town, and another on her last evening. On Sunday there was Mass in the temporary church beside the old one, which is being extended, and roughly 450 people in it. After a former student put the news on social media, the rest of the visit was met in the street.
Video calls followed to those who could not be there. Malaysia, where one is completing a master’s in civil engineering. Portugal, where two are living, one with a month-old baby. Indonesia, where another is studying forestry.
Of the twenty or so people Anne saw or heard from, eight are now teachers. One is a nutritionist with the World Health Organization. One is a civil engineer working on flood mitigation in Dili. One reports for Timor-Leste’s national broadcaster in both Tetun and English. One has put his niece and nephew through school.
“The ripple effect of your work is huge,” Anne told us.
We would put it slightly differently. The ripple is theirs. What a Palms participant does is turn up when asked, share what they know alongside people who know their own community far better, and stay long enough for it to take.
Fourteen years is long enough to find out whether that works.
