Rapping up things

The final chapter has begun of my time in Kenya!
I shall be back on home soil later next month, in need of a job and probably with a lot of culture shock.

Having been away for a month from the IT Centre Project, I returned back to Malindi 2 weeks ago, this time with Mark (over from Ireland). It was interesting to see what had changed while I was away. First of all, there had been no power for the past few days. Not due to outages (which is a normal thing here) but because of supply being cut off due to lack of payment. This was because the building manager had not handed on the money paid to him. This lack of power you have to realise totally paralyses the project, including letting visitors down who come to visit or train on the computers.
This unfortunately hasn’t been the only problem with the management and we have since had him and his business removed. We now have created a committee to run the building (the building also houses Malindi Youth Resource Centre, Malindi Disabled District Office and an art studio) and we’re gradually organising things like the presentation of the front office etc.
The other major issue running at the time of my return was the hostile atmosphere between Kathy (newly hired manager & trainer) and Jim (resource manger, founding partner). Unfortunately due to these disagreements and complaints from training course clients we had to let Kathy ago. Since her dismissal we have also discovered she was misappropriating our funds, this whole situation has now been resolved, but it’s been an interesting and educational experience I must say, teaches one to act on instincts.
We then went on safari, Mark and me, in the most beauuuuuutiful vehicle for safari. We had a great time, and then got the old-school train from Mombasa to Nairobi. I then spent a couple of days in Nairobi collecting information and equipment for the centre after Mark returned home, and then came back to Malindi. That was last week.
When I got back, I saw such a change! All the little things I wanted done around the place had been done. Amosh, our new trainer, was in full flight, booking in new students everyday and in full control of the training side of things. We are now having about 15 new students a week. Which is great!
These students are normally starting from scratch, so we run a cheap one week introduction course, which is then usually followed by MS Word, Excel and Publisher. We are also teaching QuickBooks (an accounting package) and basic programming (VB & Pascal) to those who have requested these packages.

This training is covering two major objectives, education of IT in Malindi (our primary objective of the centre) but it is also our main income generator, and if the current trend of increasing numbers of clients continues, it’ll be able to sustain the centre fully and perhaps also allow us to purchase more equipment and run other project ideas.

Currently our main focuses are:-

Computer education – in-house computer training (which is now in good hands) & a proposed schools outreach programme to rural areas.

Collecting of community development resources - from local & Nairobi organisations, and offsite Internet Access.

Advising the community of our presence – Visiting local groups, liasing with district development committee & local MP, advertisement, running basketball competition (August), assisting in school debates (July).

So we’re getting places! Hard to measure success etc, but look at it this way, once we have a secretary hired (by Monday) I feel very happy to leave this project, and only advise from the sidelines (ie email!).

I think it is best to leave a community project to the community! So with that in mind, we’re creating a community members discussion group. The idea is that this group will be both support and advisors to the centre, giving technical help and new ideas, assisting in research, contacts and liasing with the greater community, and help develop IT solutions for Malindi, the other main objective of the project.
From the IT seminar we ran in February we plan to us those lists of people and ideas to try and get a few things off the ground.

So a few things to tidy up before one goes offsite.


See you all soon!



Lindsay