PO Box and Laptops

ZANZIBAR UPDATE: Camryn and Iris led the new scholar\parent meeting at FAWE today and it went really well! They are taking the new scholars to the internet café tomorrow to set up email addresses. In addition, they are working on finding three solid mentors for the next school year and also visited a girls hostel where previous S4Si delegates set up computers and a small library.

I am keeping a blog for Sustain Foundation, which you are welcome to check out at http://sustainsakina.blogspot.com. I will include additional observations that are interesting to SF stakeholders.

Emanueli and I went into town and created Sustain Foundation’s own P.O. Box #13469. It’s definitely a great first step. We also visited Picasso Café, an overpriced tourist restaurant where Stephen, one of my brothers, is the chef. It was a really cute café and definitely a possibility for a 4th of July celebration.

I started training Emanueli and Irene on two small laptops, which were donated to Sustain Foundation and spruced up with open source Ubuntu and Open Office. There are also some educational programs on them for the scholars to use, including a typing program! I showed them how to use the laptops and some databases I made for storing information about finances and the Sakina Scholars program. We also talked about what kinds of documents we will need for the Sakina Scholar program going forward, such as an application and photo release form.

We started translating a scholar application I had made and before we knew it, the whole family was in the room pitching in. After we practice a little more, I hope they will type up a blog posting for us!

We are in the process of hiring a translator to translate all of the health assessment documents and will have them finished in the next two weeks so we can get started on the health assessment of Sakina!

The scholars are coming over again tomorrow and I can’t wait! We are giving them certificates of achievement to congratulate them for finishing their first year of secondary school (Form I). We filled out the certificates and filled in their name and school name. We are also giving them a photo release form for their parent\guardian to sign so that Sustain Foundation has official permission to use their pictures in promotional publications. Emanueli and Irene spent time after dinner translating a release form that I already had created.

During dinner, we watched Dr. Dolittle, one of the VHS tapes I brought, which Mama has already watched twice! Haha.

Vocab word of the day:
Dada – sister
Kaka – brother