My 20-year Internship with Trees, Water & People

In February 2005, I left my home in San Francisco and spun out of the sky onto the notoriously short runway of Toncontín International Airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Two weeks prior I had attended my first ETHOS clean-cooking conference in Kirkland, WA, had met Trees, Water & People’s (TWP) founder Stuart Conway for the first time, and entered an obscure line of work that would move me toward my goal of getting paid to travel to Latin America. 

After hitching multiple rides south to SF, I packed a bag and set off for what I thought would be a six month internship to launch a commercial cookstove program in the capital of Honduras. 

My blog from that first day in Tegucigalpa captures the moment:

If I had one word to describe my first impressions of the city it would be “brown”. The exposed soil, the people, the water, the buildings and the air are all some shade of reddish brown. Even the trees, from all the sun-baked dust suspended permanently in the air, appear to me in a hot, brown dusty haze. My mind raced – where am I?  Where are we going?  Which way is north?  Why are there no street signs? Are there traffic laws? How am I ever going to get around this place? What’s it gonna take to grow food in this hardpan desert? Stoves? What stoves?

I soon found myself in the Aldea Suyapa, and was befriended by a group of young men that have become like brothers to me in the years since. They introduced me to Doña Justa Nuñez, community leader on a mission to get wood smoke out of people’s homes, their work with the cookstove nonprofit I’d be working with, AHDESA, and took me up into what is now the National Wildlife Refuge of the Aldea of Suyapa (est. 2024), with a group of volunteers that eventually became our partner COEAS. 

In short, these guys showed me my future. 

20 years later, to the month, I’ve just finished my third term as board president for the annual ETHOS conference, I’m approaching my 9th year as Executive Director of TWP, and I’ve just celebrated 15 years of marriage and two kids with the woman I fell in love with during those years in Tegucigalpa. 

There is a magic to the longevity of the relationships in this story. They have all remained a significant part of my life throughout the past 20 years, and we’ve accomplished such incredible things together. We’ve built organizations, responded to natural disasters, grieved the death of loved ones, watched children grow, celebrated wins, lamented losses, challenged each other, and shared deep laughter together. 

The trust that grows from long-term engagement is what TWP is built on. So many achievements we’ve had throughout our history are a direct result of our authentic relationships, and our care for people. Because when you work on centuries-old challenges, you won’t find success with short-term, transactional engagement. Shifting this perspective has been the key to TWP’s success. 

I don’t know where my story with TWP ends, but if I turned the last page tomorrow, I’d look back with pride at all I’ve gotten to do for this beloved organization. My focus now is preparing TWP to sustain more of these critical relationships far into the future, in service of communities, but also for future employees who are a key part of building the trust that makes our work possible. 

Thank you for supporting TWP’s mission all these years, which holds as true as the day I first heard it. 

And special thanks to Stuart Conway, who took a chance on a young, underqualified Latino hippie just looking to do good work for people and the planet. We’ve had a good run ;)

Onward!