Dear friends of our children in West Africa,
I hope you are all well, that you are enjoying the summer with your families in Europe and you have managed to shuffle off your daily cares for the time being. Here at AMPO we are in the midst of preparations for our summer camp in the country which will take place on July 15th for two weeks. We are busy packing boxes with Frisbees, Monopoly, bowls and Scrabble, hundreds of bars of soap, medicines and books and lots of sticking plaster. The various kitchens can only be packed up at the last minute because we still need our huge cooking pots every day. However, they are being used to store dried gombo and sacks of rice, because they are more expensive in the country than here in the city.
The cost of living has gone up by more than 30% in Burkina Faso and that is the reason for the general unrest which is being expressed in many demonstrations – peaceful at the moment.
This time we are travelling with all the children from the orphanages, plus the people from MIA and ALMA and the children form the rehab centre, some of them physically handicapped, who don’t have a home to go to. All the teachers from the various projects are coming with us this time, so we need busses and accommodation for about 280 people, large and small.
Thank God for our usual modesty, so we rent an empty school building and can sleep in the classrooms. It’s a good job we don’t have beds at AMPO because the kids would otherwise have problems changing to sleeping on simple mats. Everyone is getting excited already and some have started making fishing rods and skipping ropes. The bigger ones help the small ones – something we are really good at. As a surprise on the day we set off I’m going to buy 40 drums for the kids, because they will then have time to practise. All the kids who have just left school (now young adults) will give us a hand at summer camp.
In the past few months the children have been very nervous because they were unable to go to school for six whole weeks on account of the unrest in the country. Shots were being fired on the road leading to school. Fear is not very conducive to concentration. At AMPO were able to carry on with schoolwork every day thanks to the private tutors and this was a great help: yesterday the results of the CEP exams (after 6 years at school) came through and all 8 AMPO children passed. We are now waiting for our BPC and high school diploma results. It is looking good. We are very happy with the children; they express their thanks to us and to all of you with a really good performance.
We are already looking forward to the new intake of youngsters who are currently in the selection process conducted by at team of psychologists and teachers. It is a lot of work, because we cannot take everything at face value and we visit all the candidates at home to check on all the information. We only take the very poorest children. At the same time AMPO has to start with the organisation of tuition fee assistance for external children, which costs around Euro 20,000 a year. This is the result of the truly generous donation from the Jack-O company which makes it possible for 500 children to attend primary school and a further 200 to attend high school. We only assist those who already perform well because we want our country to make progress. Lazy kids have no chance. In the meantime we have entered all the names and records into our computer – the advance of technology – but it would be nice, however if we also had the electricity supply to go with it every day. Sometimes we are still without electricity for 4 to 6 hours a day.
There has been a lot of remodeling going on at AMPO this year, because the workshop for the handicapped is scheduled to move, the tailoring workshop is expanding and has to move, the children’s kitchen will move into the tailoring workshop and we will set up a new hairdressing salon to train our girls, something that has been on the wish-list for a long time and now we can make it happen. The restaurant kitchen will expand, which is urgently required, because our trainee chefs are tripping over each other. Have you ever seen a restaurant with 60 places, catering at the same time for 300 guests at an embassy reception, with a kitchen of 3 square metres? Outside temperature 45° and working over a hot stove? African logistics can be dramatic, but let me tell you, it works! Things should be easier now, however.
The first buildings in the new “Emma Yiri” generation project are complete. After the third attempt at drilling we found a good supply of water 48 metres down. Thank God and Inshallah! Everything was depending on that and I spent 3 whole days quaking beside the drilling site … all went well. Now we are waiting for the first heavy rains to pass and then we can start building the school and the office in August. Parts of the wall are already quite colourful. It will probably be completed in October. Meanwhile I have to make another two trips to Europe, lecturing in Portugal and Denmark.
In the meantime it has become official: after careful examination (over several days), Katrin Rohde has become an Ashoka Fellow, with approval from Washington. You might want to Google it. I am in the illustrious company of 2000 other changemakers from 70 countries. I have just returned from a 4-day conference in Paris to which I was invited. This conference involved a huge amount of work and I could think of nothing other than making progress in Africa. That is exactly where I fit in with all my ideas, something which does not happen very often. In the picture you can see our special working group on Africa after a 2-hour meeting, people with the most incredible ideas, including on the right a Belgian from Tanzania and Mozambique who breeds rats to detect landmines, a woman from Uganda who protects gorillas by giving the local population who eat them the possibility to access other sources of income. In the middle is Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka, an elderly gentleman full of charisma, a highly motivated, satisfied professional. Ashoka Fellows tackle the problems of others and develop practical models: A young girl, 16 years old, is told she has cancer and she sets up a global network “Girls for girls” in which, 2 years down the line, 4,500 girls can talk about their problems and come up with solutions. An elderly Turkish farmer plants 8 hectares of wheat using organic farming methods and starts a lobby group in which after 4 years there are now 50,000 farmers in Turkey apply organic farming methods. He is illiterate and only speaks Turkish. I received the award for the idea and implementation of our Tondtenga farm, offering young people in the country a chance to prevent rural exodous, combat the streetkid phenomenon and set up hundreds of organic farms with young farmers who spread the idea among their neighbours in turn.
Nevertheless I felt very small and I am aware that there is still a lot of work ahead. We are now going to set up an Ashoka radio station for the whole of Africa. I am highly motivated and grateful when I see after 20 years that many of our orphaned children have turned into trend-setting young people, precisely those with whom we will have a real future. I believe that we can still work on our current model for a better Africa.
Of course, hand in hand with all of you. Isn’t it exciting? But first we are off to summer camp, yippee! Thanks to all your help we will relax, hang around doing nothing, sing and play and look forward to the coming year with renewed vigour.
With very best wishes from Ouagadougou,
Katrin Rohde
SAHEL e.V.
Am Strohberg 2 • 24306 Plön • Tel.0 45 22 – 78 98 85 • Fax 0 45 22 – 78 98 86
Email: info.sahel@sahel.de Internet: www.sahel.de
Spendenkonto bei der Förde Sparkasse Plön: • Kto. Nr. 5785 • BLZ 210 501 70
Internationale Bankverbindung: IBAN (Konto-Nr.):
DE27 2105 0170 0000 005785 BIC (Bankidentifikation): NOLADE21KIE
