My NGO

My NGO has a 52 member completely voluntary staff and it consists of 10 members of the board of directors, 32 field workers who act as liaisons between the board and the partner community-based organizations, and 10 messengers/janitors who care for the building. The office is located just across the street from where my host family lives. I am now part of the board of directors. I serve as country program director and am second in command under the chairman.

Our NGO simply supports other community based organizations, grassroots organizations. They have not received any funding from outside sources up to this point. Their funding has simply been personal donations from the staff members themselves. Amazingly, last year they gave contributed what translates to about $4,000, and these are not rich men and women. This helped about 1,850 people in this community. They are only serving people in Kenema District right now, but that covers Kenema town as well as surrounding villages. Some major accomplishments for 2007 include: organizing 10 home-based orphanages, finding caretakers, and donations of food and other basic items, donating seedlings for agricultural projects to reduce hunger and create income, donating scholarships (that is school fees, school is not free here) for 8 students for high school, lending technical assistance to skills training programs for the blind and those with polio.

We are currently we are writing our plan for 2008. We hope to offer more support to our current partners. The biggest project is going to be to create and orphanage village, to include a school, health clinic, and boarding house. Many children here have parents who were killed in the war. There is a huge problem with commercial sex work here. Many young people have no other way to be fed since they have no caregivers. Others are forced to do that work by their parents to support the whole household. We need to give them skills training so they can do something else. Anyways, when I complete the 2008 plan (this week) I will post it. Anybody reading this can support any of the projects they see. U.S. dollars go a long way here. You see all they did with the little money they had last year.

I have also formed a youth group with 56 members. We are part of this program called One World Youth Project (see link). The curriculum is already written. I teach a class of high school students in the morning and one with middle school students in the evening. We have a partner class in Seattle, Washington at a high school. We are doing cultural exchange projects that I email to the class in America and they reply and I show it to my class. We also learn about leadership and we are going to do a large community service project. I dismissed them yesterday for the holiday, but they are writing a series of plays about the hazards of commercial sex work (HIV, unwanted pregnancy, etc), the causes (poverty, peer pressure, etc.) and the solutions (sensitization, skills training, etc.) We are going to video tape it and play it at cinemas (places where people pay to watch tv, mostly for soccer games) around town. We are also going to have a condom distribution project. More to come on that after the holidays.
You can see the office in this picture. There are some member of the youth group in front of it (yeah, they aren’t really used to smiling for pics).

The next picture is of a home-based orphanage I visited.

The two pictures after that are the skills training center for polio patients we support.