AWWA connection links ‘women who love water’

Last March, at the New Jersey Section’s annual conference, longtime member Carol Walczyk shared with her colleagues and friends that she’d be moving to Paris for a job opportunity later in the year.

Over breakfast, Mona Cavalcoli (Walczyk’s friend and executive director of the New Jersey Section since 2001 when Walczyk stepped down) said she’d visit in November — she already had a trip planned.

“And then we just started joking, ‘We’ll crash Mona’s vacation and have a New-Jersey-water-women-in-Paris vacation,’” said Alexandra Wells, New Jersey’s AWWA director, who was also sitting at breakfast that day. She later phoned Marisah Potkalesky, New Jersey’s public information committee chair, and said, “We’re going to Paris. I’m serious.”

Eight months later, it came to be.

Cavalcoli, Wells, and Potkalesky set off on a 10-day trip that included not only a visit with Walczyk — who moved for an opportunity with Veolia — but also Giselle Diaz (New Jersey’s chair), who was in town for a friend’s birthday bash.

“It was kismet,” Potkalesky said. “We just kept saying, ‘How lucky are we?’ To be with good friends and to be enjoying each other’s company.”

The five women, who all have come to know each other through their involvement with the American Water Works Association, set off on a nighttime Seine River cruise — complete with custom T-shirts that read, “Les femmes qui aiment l’eau.” (In English, “the women who love water.”) “I thought that if we go, we should have shirts,” a laughing Cavalcoli said.

Beyond the cruise, Cavalcoli, Wells, and Potkalesky toured Paris — including popular destinations like the Louvre and Notre Dame — and southern France, but they say the best parts of the trip were the unplanned days and lingering together over meals.

“I love what I do, and the balance that AWWA has always brought to me through friends is what fills my cup,” Wells said. “Spending time with these people who I adore and who I have this common mission with, it’s so fulfilling.”

They’re already joking about organizing another trip, in part, because they weren’t able to see a key site on their wish list: the Paris Sewer Museum.

“We’re water geeks after all,” Cavalcoli said.