Darling

A few years ago, I discovered Jackie Kay a Scottish poet. She makes me cry and laugh*, in general, makes me believe that the world is a messy place, but sublimely so.



What a gift it must be to speak your mind and ponder your thoughts in such a way as with words well chosen.



I have a friend back in Montreal who does so by writing plays. Watching Jackie Kay read her poems today, made me miss my friend, for she can always shake me awake with her words.

* Be sure to listen to both of the poems in both of the videos.

Helping Women and Youths

Over the years I've been following the work of various social enterpreuers and activists. There are quite a few people, but I suppose the 3-4 people who have most directly changed my thinking on what to do and how to do things to help change the future in a positive and constructive mannter,are Nathan Eagle, Ory Okolloh, Ethan Zuckerman, and Jacqueline Novogratz.

Jacqueline Novogratz is the CEO of the Acumen Foundation and she and the foundation efforts to promot "patient capital" is highlightedin CNBC World in their program “What the Future” (part 1, part 2, part 3). Please give it a watch. In the first part of the program, the post election escalation of violence is portrayed.

It was during this time that the 250 children and gaurdians of the NGO that I work with, Community Breakthrough Support Mission (CBSM), had to be evacuated out of Nairobi and transported to Kimilili, Kenya. In the last two years, Rev. Wasike and the elders of the CBSM have tried very hard to help the women and youths to build a strong community.

Those of us working with the CBSM often get asked why we are focusing so much of our efforts on helping women co-ops and youth groups to build successful small-scale businesses. Recently, Rev. Wasike wrote the following about our work in general and empowering women and youth specifically. I'd like to share with you his thoughts on the matter for the eloquently argue the matter:

The essence of all of our work is to make the community a self-reliant and independent collective. This compels us to initiate programs that may be realised by the women in the local community. Women in Kimilili and the surrounding area have not been allowed to partake in running business es because their husbands do not approve. They believe women should stay culturally apart where they can bring up their children in the homes; irrespective of whether there is food available or whether their children are attending school or not. Traditionally, women have been competing in the number of children they give birth to as a form of status since polygamy is still practiced.

For as long as I can remember, youth 's work in our community was to take care of the livestock. Tragically, this livestock no longer exist in large scale as used to be, hence make this group is left idle and hence a source of violence and crime in the community.

My understanding is that what a child needs most today in order to be self reliant tomorrow is food and a good education to unlock potential of the child. A child also needs shelter for security and health when sick.

Most men in Kenya, and this is culturally approved , believe it is okay for them to inclusively use any income increase they earn to increase the number of wives. The bigger their families are, the more respect they earn in the community. This is unlike women, whose first priority is the wellbeing of their family (parents and children.

I believe that by empowering women and youth in the community, we are doing something similar to doing an overhaul on an engine that we can always count on for the rest of our long journey. Thankfully, it is becoming more common to see women running business than it was previously. Yet, without proper knowledge on how they can best do business and without the proper capital their journey is arduous.

Hence if a chance arises for us to empower one woman who has 10 children, what we are doing in creating this opportunity is taking care of the 10 children. In fact, starting the women empowering program has already created real help. For instance, during the last school term almost all the vegetables the school cooked for the children came for free from the women co-ops we trained in our first two CBSM Gardening Vocational Training Program workshops. During the workshops, we taught them best business practices and gave them water pumps and seeds.

This term we have avoided the cost of cooks, as four women who had applied to be enlisted for workshops and our facility was not able to accommodate them, offered to do the cooking at CBSM school for free for children this term . They did this on the condition that they would be able to attand the next series of workshops. They have done wonderful work this term, reduced the cost of running the school as salary for cooks is recurring cost and recurring costs are very painful always come when one one is not ready. Fortunately, we are happy to be giving our next workshops in August, which they will be able to attend.

It is our believe that through collective will and work we will offer our children a safe and happy environment to grow in.

Amen
Rev. Wasike

Changing What is on Your Plate

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How to feed the world ? from Denis van Waerebeke on Vimeo.

This interesting video was made for the «Bon appétit» exhibition in Paris science museum (Cité des sciences et de l’industrie). It was aimed mainly at kids aged 9 to 14, but I must say that this 52-year-old also learnt a fair amount.

As many of you know, the NGO that I work with in Kimilili, Kenya is trying to set up a gardening vocational training program. The program goals are the following,

"Our CBSM Gardening Vocational Training Program teaches women co-ops and youths from our Youth Vision program about sustainable agriculture and good business practices. The participants formed their co-ops under supervision of community elders, and work in collaboration to implement good farming practices and create small-scale garden businesses.

We are presently cultivating two acres of leased land; growing a variety of vegetables and grains using drip irrigation systems, poly culture techniques, and other practices in hope that we can increase the yields of these gardens. We would like to extend the scope of our present program and establish a permanent self-sustaining vocational training program in the next two and a half years. To this end we need to establish better collaboration with sources of information and training and to find proper funding. The practices taught and used in our program focus on counteracting the devastation the persisting drought has and is creating in our community."

That is the sort description. The long one would take a long time to point out all of the challenges. Yet, I must say that the people involved in the project, both locally and internationally, are such a motivated and resourceful group.  I thought I might mention a few of the challenges in the next while so that you could send me your ideas and feedback on how to manage them. You can either leave a comment here or write to me (virtualredtent at yahoo dot com). Please feel free to pose any questions or make any comments you wish.

Taking Baby Steps

These last weeks have been filled with various work on various projects. Most of the work seems like a hard build up to a specific goal and then a long tail slug afterwards to get all the odds and ends collected and properly put in place. Thought I'd write about some of the stuff I've been involved in:

The group I work with in Kenya, has finally received the money from the charity tea party and various other donations (bank here sent the funds to Mombasa and not to Nairobi). If all goes well, they will buy 5 drip irrigation kits this week and head up to Kimilili on Friday and hold two best business training workshops this weekend. I am kind of excited because another women's co-op from Kitale is also attending one of the workshops and they will receive one of the drip irrigation kits for their community. It is our hope that once the two communities see what drip irrigation is all about they might find the means to make their own DIY systems.

I've (finally) finished writing a project proposal for our Gardening Vocational Training Program. This is a program targeted towards women's co-ops and our youth project group. We want to set up a garden project where groups work in collaboration learning and implementing "modern" sustainable agriculture techniques. (The reason I say "modern" is that many of these methods, such as polyculture, mulch systems, organic composting, etc. were techniques western countries took away from indigenous farming cultures in developing countries over the last 70 years. It is ironic that we are in the position of trying to reintroduce these techniques back into those countries so many years later.) The project proposal is for approx. 8,000 USD for the purchase of land and materials (e.g. treadle pump and drip irrigation systems). If anyone knows of an organization that might fund such a project please send me a link.

We are in the process of setting up a clean cooking fuel small-scale business co-op between the Makerere University in Uganda and various rural communities. This project is going to take a while to develop because we haven't the proper technology as yet. We are trying to establish a pilot project to make clean burning cooking briquettes out of bio-waste (e.g. maize cobs or sugar cane). These briquettes burn nearly smokeless and set out no toxins and save on the need to burn wood. I'm still at the stage of trying to figure out the technology needed and set up a feasible collaborative business model. The outline of the project currently is to have a) a youth vocational training program that mass produces and sells the corn cob crushers (a wooden box with a coarse roller to crush the charcoal bits), b) a central briquette-making press where people can come with their crushed charcoal and make the cooking briquettes, and c) a series of small-scale businesses to sell the cooking briquettes at markets.

We are trying to set up a NGO so that we can do all the project work mentioned above more formally. This would mean that those individuals who contribute donations or micro-loans would be able to make them tax deductible. It would also mean that we could approach more organisations and foundations for funding.

My son managed to hand in a research paper titled, Web 2.0 Revolution (Consequences for Corporations), last week. This was a volunteer paper he researched and wrote in the hope of improving his final grade when he graduates from high school next June. I volunteered to yield the whip to get him to set up a schedule, work on the paper regularly, and not get preoccupied with all sorts of other activities. This was not an easy task, nor one that I did with any grace or sense of authority. Contrarily, it consisted of a great amount of petty hysterics, long plea bargainings, and mini breakdowns on my part.

Time to go off to the office...

Enriching Our Lives

A few months ago, I met Rev. Wasike Wilberforce Walubengo of the Benanda Breakthrough Support Mission in Kimilili, Kenya. We decided to collaborate on an endeavour to set up a website and community blog for his organization. We met through Nabuur, an online volunteering platform that links online volunteers with local communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Rev. Wasike had little knowledge about the workings of internet technology and I had even less knowledge about running an organization that cares and educates 250 OVC (orphans and vulnerable children). This did not deter us from forming a working partnership. The work and the communication with Rev. Wasike have altered my perspective of the world concerning poverty and abundance of spirit. Since we met, I’ve been learning many lessons about how enriching meaningful social interaction can be, especially if it is with others living far away.

One of the key lessons I’ve learnt is just how simple it is to interact with others. Online communities like Nabuur, Roots & Shoots, AIDG, Change.org, Architecture for Humanity, etc. makes it remarkably easy for us to connect to other people all over the globe. Even though I am fortunate to work together with people within my circle of friends, my family, and community, reaching out further, to people living in countries I’ve not visited, had been transformational.

In particular, I see such global volunteer platforms as potentially being of great help for those of us, who seek creative and constructive interaction with others. If we could all become engaged to some extent or another with social communities, we would not only enrich other people’s lives, but we would enrich our own.