On my bed this week, laid out on a checkered cloth, sit the small documents that make a big journey possible: a Canadian passport, a Republic of Kenya eTA, a TMVC International Certificate of Vaccinations, and the familiar yellow International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Looked at one way, it is just paperwork. Looked at another way, it is a map of how far one life can travel when commitment and gratitude walk together.
I am getting ready for the Joint World Conference on Social Work, Education and Social Development, SWSD 2026, in Nairobi, Kenya, under the beautiful theme Harambee for Sustainable Shared Futures. Harambee is a Swahili word that means all pull together. I cannot think of a better name for what this conference has meant to me across the years.
Let me tell you about those years, because they are part of why this trip matters so much.
My first SWSD was Stockholm in 2012. I want to be honest about what that meant for me then. I was still a Ukrainian citizen, and to attend a conference in Sweden I needed a Schengen visa. Ukrainians did not gain visa-free access to the Schengen area until June 2017, so in 2012 the path to a single academic conference ran through an embassy, an application, and the quiet hope that the answer would be yes. I remember the weight of that. I remember understanding, in my body, that mobility is not given equally to everyone.
From there the journey continued. Melbourne in 2014. Seoul in 2016. Dublin in 2018. Then the world stopped for a while, as it did for all of us, and the pandemic kept us apart. We found each other again in Panama in 2024. And now, in 2026, Nairobi.
Each of those cities holds faces, conversations, and ideas that changed how I teach. That is the gift of this conference. It gathers social workers, educators, researchers, and community advocates from every corner of the globe, and it reminds us that we are all pulling together on the same human work.
I will not pretend this trip was easy to prepare for. It was hard. There was teaching to finish first, the courses, the students, the final assignments that deserve full attention right up to the last day. There was the most important responsibility of all: finding trusted, around-the-clock care for Mama Lidia so that I could travel knowing she is safe and loved while I am away. And there was the matter of my own body, of making sure I could travel safely to a part of the world that asks us to prepare with care.
That preparation is its own small story of community. My doctor and the nurses guided me through it with patience and kindness. I received the yellow fever vaccination, the oral typhoid, and a tetanus shot administered by my doctor. For Twinrix, the timing was tight and Costco was not able to administer it, so Pratt pharmacy stepped in and made sure I was protected before the window closed. To every doctor, nurse, and pharmacist who helped me get here, thank you. You are part of this journey too. Caring for the traveler is its own form of social work.
And so the documents on my bed tell the truth: fully vaccinated, eTA ready, and coming to the conference.
I do not take any of this lightly. There is a privilege in being able to travel, a privilege I once did not hold in the same way, and I carry it with gratitude. I think of the Stockholm visa and the Nairobi eTA as bookends on a single sentence about belonging, about a Ukrainian-born Canadian who gets to keep showing up, keep learning, and keep sharing.
Commitment to social work and social development is what keeps me going. It is what carries me through the hard logistics and the long flights. I have been teaching since 2005, and Nairobi will be one more chapter in a 21-year journey in the classroom. There I am looking forward to meeting fellow educators, to learning the best ways of teaching social work and social development, and to sharing what these 21 years have taught me, the lessons, the frameworks, the love, care, and share ethic that holds all of it together.
Harambee. All pull together. I will see you in Nairobi.
Love. Care. Share.
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