What a country I found myself in. There were 3.3 million people with no food to eat in the northeastern regions. There was an acute water shortage in Nairobi; power cuts were endemic. But with the temperature between 11 and 18 degrees Celsius (52-64 F), the air was cool. I needed just two mugfuls of water for bathing, my own frugality having bailed me out and left me free to concentrate on birds, fragrances, open spaces, blue skies, and new life. I so rapidly grew used to living in the middle of need that soon, being here almost began to seem like my destiny.

In my very first day of work at PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health), I was flung headlong into a two-day workshop to figure out how to develop a cooperative proposal for a five-year reproductive health project in specific parts of Kenya. I have considered myself an HIV/AIDS person, not a Family Planning person. I learned a good deal at the workshop, mainly that in traditional reproductive health, it has been considered sufficient to increase the number of contraceptive options available to people and improve the quality of clinic services. Amen, I thought. If those in the know said that was how it was to be done, then who was I to question?

Then Eve joined the meeting. In her 60s with dyed black hair, grey creeping out around the ears, Eve is definitely a grandmother, but still with her flower-child colours and home-grown authority. And that became clear as she spoke. Everyone in the room was hanging on her every word.

"There's some chap called Sen, won a Nobel Prize, who said that if you give women political skills, then you can just take your project and go home," said Eve. "They take over the fight, and believe me, they'll turn their communities around."

The "Sen" she was talking about was the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Amartya Sen, and his exact quote was this: "Women's ability to act in the public arena is critical to their individual and collective capacity to influence policies and practices affecting the quality and autonomy of their lives including their overall health, reproductive health, and child survival." Of course, the way Eve had put it -- "give women political skills" -- sounded clear enough to me.

Sensing growing interest in her cause, Eve began to flesh out her theme. The words "political skills" and "women's agency" went up on the flip chart as Strategy E.

A little later in the session, it struck me that it might be terribly arrogant of us to decide that political skills were what women needed. They might have other, better ideas. I proposed that what we should have was a process in which women could at least begin speaking about what they thought they needed and that the project should make those things available. Maybe literacy. Income-generation ideas. Maybe child care. Who knows.

Further into the session, it struck me that if the project encouraged women of a community to develop skills, then at some stage, the men might just step in and squash the whole process. Or they might start beating up the women in their lives for attending these meetings. So I said that it would be useful if the idea of letting women speak out could somehow come, not from these international agencies, but from the men of the community.

Long story short, all the hard work of that week is finally on the ground nearly a year later, as a fascinating project called Amkeni ("awakening" in Kiswahili), a USAID-funded project that looks holistically at reproductive health, family planning, and child survival within selected Kenyan communities. And we are treading the uncharted waters of family-to-family peer education to involve communities in empowering women, as well as massaging communities into a slow process of change that they could own and lead.

After a year with PATH, I realize, more and more, that this is where we are coming from. We take that numb and browbeaten word "empowerment" very seriously. We have serious issues with any approach that patronizes the poor and the unschooled. We are exploring new depths of patience with "process," acknowledging that behavior change is slow, difficult, painstaking, and may not happen in a time frame set by a donor's funding cycle.

I feel like I've been thrown feet first into a very deep swimming pool. I never thought I'd be in a position to do so much, learn so much, and if I am lucky, make a small difference. The words of Cat Stevens' song Silent Sunlight keep playing in my head:

"Sleep horses, heave away
Turn your backs to the golden hay
Don't look behind on what you've done
For your work has just begun
There'll be the evening in the end
Till that time arrives, you can rest your eyes
And begin again."

:: C.Y. ("Gopi") Gopinath
Nairobi, Kenya

When he is not planet-trotting in search of people and stories, cooking, composing music for stage musicals, growing herbs, and writing books about his offbeat experiences in different countries, Gopi works as Creative Director with Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), Kenya, where his main work is wondering about human behavior.