Working things out

One of the reasons for Whiskers and Nettie to visit, was the Agency Conference. We I'm not that into conferences, so I will not dwell on it, nor do I need to report on it. The other reason was the opportunity to look -check - on projects and the various volunteers.

Big E had a few projects that had been funded by NZHC, and while none were completed he spoke well and justified what had happened and generally made things look pretty good. We went to look at two unfinished water projects, one at Nadasoito and the other at Mswakini. More on those at another time.

Nettie was impressed with the nursery and interested in our ideas of working with schools to improve the environment. I suspect she could see that the funded projects needed some supervision.

Mo & Jo had told her that Hifadhi had no money to support our project. Not our project, but the project we belonged to. Ownership of any project was with the people directly involved - the end users.

Nettie advised me to write up a project funding proposal. She told me that I needed to state that I would control all funds and be responsible for them.

I wrote a simple proposal - funding of the tree nursery to produce trees that could be given out to participating schools - that is schools where we carry out seminars and they only receive trees after the holes are prepared to plant them in. The funding included vehicle expenses.

Mo took my proposal to Harare (with a bottle of whiskey) and returned with the acceptance of the proposal. The rules were that we received money in monthly amounts from the Agency bank account and then after fully accounting for the money spend, another month's would be advanced. I was asked to keep on Big E's case to ensure the water projects were completed.

Then there was something else - Mo & Jo had been working with Nettie on a project to assist primary schools. This included supplying desks, text books, teacher's aids, building of toilets and painting of blackboards.

I could immediately see the potential of this - not only would it help the schools enormously it would help us to access the schools. Each volunteer was to be given five schools to assist, but as it turned out not all vols wanted to take up the offer, so we were allocated ten, and that later swelled to 12 which turned out to be hard work but as fulfilling at the same time.

This was to make an assignment that I could fell very comfortable with - we were very lucky.