How it's all getting on....?

Many a month has passed and operations are continuing strong.

At the ICT Resource Centre, Jim and Amosh have been working hard, and have been keeping the original aims close to heart. Zahura our secretary has returned to college and we wish her the best in her further studies.
In September the centre was visited by some lovely volunteers from Ireland. They were directed there by Hilary, the chief of the Kenya Fund (which PCs for Africa are part of). These medical students and teachers helped tremendously at the centre and with the local community, becoming involved with local schools - through introductions by the centre, teaching at the centre at the weekends, and generally giving great energy to the place and the staff.

The centre has been running outreach programs to the local community, trying to bring the knowledge of computers to the wider community. This is being done by visiting schools outside of the town and introducing computers to them.
Public primary school children are also coming to the centre to study basic computer use.
These projects are all being run free of charge, which is obviously the best way to make this education available to all.
Another plan which is now coming into the fore and which one school has committed to already, is bringing their students to the school, for secondary level computer studies. This brings many benefits to all. We also get a greater contact and recognition with the community in the work we are doing, and it will also act as an income generating activity for us.
Unfortunately all this good work does need money behind it, and through my own support and others it is amazing how far a little money can go.

The centre is now going to be moving location, only a little bit down the road. The land our building is on has been sold, and there have been many problems with fellow tenants with making payments and the electricity being turned off.
This new building is within an office space environment and all services are including in the renting price (€100 per month). With this closer to the main road location, we hope to have an even better contact with the passing local person and thus give ourselves the opportunity to further assist in the community.

Dammer a friend of mine and Jim's has come up from Nairobi to help over the next few months with the move and all things technical, and we greatly appreciate her help and presence.


At the Love SHACK, big moves have been happening there too! They have moved themselves out of the slums and the pollution and into the fresh air of Ngong, a suburb of Nairobi. They are continuing to carry out amazing work, and really help in the lives of so many children and families.

They have been working hard to raise money for a vehicle which will greatly assist and help many more people. They have raised nearly half that money only over the last few months, and hopefully early in the new year, this dream will be complete. Please check out http://www.loveshackkenya.ie/donate.htm to see how to help!
I'll keep you up to date on anymore events they are running too!


PCs for Africa are operating strongly too. The schools of course are using the computers in Kenya on a daily basis, but here at home we are working on finding more computers to send out, to the ever growing list of ready schools for the equipment.
Unfortunately the big hold up to this work is the need for a warehouse to store the computers which companies are ready to donate to us. I too have computers in my garage, but without the space to safely store them and work on them, the work can't continue.
All we need is a small accessible space where we can keep the computers over the next 6 months and work on them out of office hours.
Once we have this, the work of collecting the computers and getting them out to Kenya will be the easy part!
Please if you know anyone, anywhere please help us with this!



As part of my aim to keep people up to date with the work of small volunteers and the help we can do ourselves for the wider community, I gave a few talks in Enniskerry last month on my experiences in Kenya over the past year. This was a really enjoyable experience and a few more are planned in the future.
I am also setting up a small discussion group which will look at the work and progress of volunteering in the community, both here in Ireland, and also around the world in developing countries.
If anyone would be interested in being involved in these social informal evenings or want to volunteer in Kenya, feel free to contact me through these contacts

Cheers!

Lindsay