Work Updates

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

On a VERY exciting note, Boabab Branch Educational Programmes has a new home!! After many long conversations about how to grow the Baobab program strategically, Amos was able to identify a house just outside the Nakuru CBD (Commercial Business District) that was a good fit for our ideas of an expanded Baobab. We created a project budget requesting initial capital for the expansion, wrote a proposal and submitted it to Transparency in Action, a Ft. Collins, CO based non-profit that has a relationship with Baobab. The immediately agreed to fund the first year of rent, and hold a fundraiser to assist with other initial costs that will become sustainable as Baobab is able to expand its’ programming in the new space and with some additional new resources. A down payment has now been made on the space, and we are making lots of preparations for the upcoming expansion.

We expect a Grand Opening will take place in early August, once we are back from our East Africa exploration trip. I am not going to get into the details of each organization here, but full explanations of each are available on the SpanAfrica website at www.spanafrica.org.

On the trip, we are finalizing our travel plans, and everything is working out very well. We will leave on July 10 with Mama Vicky and Paul to visit their rural home outside Kisumu, near Lake Victoria. From there we will take a bus to Kampala, Uganda, where we will be staying in a homestay hosted by TDMI, a SpanAfrica Grassroots Partner. We will travel with TDMI to many of their program sites in Uganda. We will also visit the Northern region with TDMI and to visit a new potential partner in Gulu. This is an area where the Lord’s Resistance Army is very active, which is notorious for its use of child soldiers. We will also travel to Kasese to visit FEFO another Grassroots Partner.

All along the way, we will also be reintroducing SpanAfrica and the benefits of our partnership and SpanAfrica’s goals in Africa and with our partners. The most exciting part for me, in my role as Operations Support Coordinator, is that we will be delivering and introducing our partner organizations to the Grassroots Manual and Workbook. This is a set of documents that Cam and I have been working on for a few weeks that will help organizations thing through and document all of the processes and elements necessary to help them clearly identify and succeed in achieving their goals.

From Kasese, we hope to travel directly to Kigale, Rwanda. We are still finalizing plans for Rwanda. We will spend a few days there, and then will return to Kigale to spend another day with TDMI. We will then go back East to Iganga, where we will meet with FORDAR. We will travel back into Kenya through Kisumu, where we will depart for Tanzania. We will travel to Arusha, and hopefully to Ngorororo to visit Daphne Murphy, Daphne Rowe and Pinky Rowe, who will be volunteering at the Rift Valley Children’s Village. From there, we go to Dar es Salaam to meet with Wazesha, another Grassroots Partner. We will then drag our travel weary selves to Zanzibar for a few days of recuperation on the white-sand beaches!

We will then return to Nakuru, where the Baobab branch Grand Opening will be just about ready. All in all, it will be a busy and intense and highly productive trip. For me, it will continue in October when I head to Zambia!