EwaCalle

The end is near… We have about ten days before we have to go back. Ten days is still enough time for a lot to happen so I’m not going to summarize anything yet. However I am going to tell you how we have been spending our last few weeks and how we are most likely going to spend the days that are left. We left Nairobi to Momabasa (as I have already mentioned) and we ended up staying three nights in a small Hotel next to a mosque in central Mombasa. We didn’t do much in Mombasa, apart from walking around the old part of the city and looking at souvenirs. However one of the days we decided to go south of Mombasa to one of the beaches. Having no idea of what places were ... read more

Last day in Uganda. What will I never delete from my memory? • Riding on an old, rusty Boda- boda (motorcycle) with two more passengers without helmet and on a sketchy, dusty road where you would normally only use a 4WD- car or quad. • Delicious chapatti and African chai. I love it more than pizza! • Traditional, lovely and colorful dresses worn by all Ugandan ladies. Even women selling potatoes or working in the field look quite amazing with their almost carnival outfits. • Hundreds and hundreds of children playing on the streets and greeting us every time we walk by. However, leaving our new African family and new established NGO is thousands of times more difficult than leaving Uganda. We did a great deal of work. Within two months we managed to create the ... read more

We have been working hard the last few days. We have two big ongoing projects that we have taken responsibility over. The first is as the organization has changed name from Uganda Children’s Hope Foundation to the Giving Circle Africa, then we are launching a new webpage. The UCHF was a Community Based Organization, but the GCA is intended to be a Non Governmental Organization and therefore there has been some restructuring, mainly spearheaded by Ewa and I. So we thought that a new and fresh webpage was a good start. So we are in the process of getting all the content done by the end of the week and then we will have our ‘webpage guy’ set it up. So hopefully we will have it running by the end of next week. The second project ... read more

I’ve been writing a lot about some of the activities that we have been doing. So this time I thought I would write a little more about the everyday life here in Uganda, more specifically my sleeping habits, or lack there of. I have always thought of Africa as quite a hectic place, specially the cities. But I thought one could easily find places to escape and relax. Well I’ve been here for nearly three weeks and I haven’t found any peace yet. There is always some noise screeching in your ears. This would be a typical day described in its acoustic form: 05.00 The roosters start their morning call. It’s like they are greeting each other. Our rooster starts, the neighbors’ answers, then another joins in and so on. 06.00 Ewas alarm goes off and ... read more

Work from 8 till 16 in an air conditioned office with a bunch of young professionals eager to put their ideas into action? NOT HERE. We wake up as early as the roosters start to crow and without even thinking of having breakfast we focus on work. Many things to plan, organize, write, prepare, think through and talk over! We’ve been thrown in at the deep end. The organization is quite young so it doesn’t have any structure. The responsibility for drawing up the statute, introducing policies and dividing competences among the bodies of organization forces me to treat this work very seriously. Carl’s work isn’t much easier – on one hand he works on issues linked to budget and on the other – he tries to create a business model. How is everything going? Not ... read more