What We Did in Africa

admin — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:39:02 +0000

July 5th, 12pm - I'm looking out the Virgin Atlantic airplane window at Mt. Kenya as we end our twelve day trip to Kenya and Uganda. We've begun the twenty-eight hour journey home. East Africa is a beautiful region with substantial economic opportunity, and very worthy of a visit. This was my second trip to Uganda, but first to Kenya. What Drew Us In We went to learn. We went to visit some of the non-profits The Humanity Campaign has worked with in the past and those we are considering supporting in the future. We came back changed permanently having seen the juxtaposition of the beautiful rising Africa against the constant suffering of unlistened to and forgotten millions of people just like you and I. In the developing world, 2.6 billion people live under $2 per day (PPP adjusted) according to the World Bank and 49,300 people die each and every day needlessly from preventable disease and starvation according to the WHO. Some of The Stories That Sear Themselves Into Your Memory For just a second, imagine 139 girls from your local elementary school have been kidnapped by an armed rebel group and taken to a jungle 400 miles away. One hundred and nine of them are negotiated to be returned but 30 of them stay and are raped, abused, and are forced to be sex slaves for as long as thirteen years. Six of these thirty girls are killed attempting to escape. Imagine hiding in a snake-infested ceiling drop at your high school to avoid being kidnapped by the LRA. Imagine being 17 and living in a slum in Africa with over 1 million residents. Both your parents died of AIDS, then your grandfather was killed, then your pastor who took you in abused you. Now you're on your own, struggling everyday to survive. These are just some of the life altering stories I've heard over the last twelve days. Day By Day, What We Did

Bob Phoenix, Jess Shorland, and I left the iContact parking lot at 4:30pm on Wednesday June 24. We drove over to Raleigh-Durham International Airport for our flight to London. We arrived in Heathrow Airport on Thursday morning, took the Heathrow Express to Paddington, took the Underground to Waterloo, and were on the London Eye by 10:30am in good tourist form. In our twelve hour layover in London we rode the Eye, took photos on the lions at Trafalgar Square, ate Bangers and Mash at The Clarence, saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham, and visited the London office of Credit Suisse in Canary Wharf to visit some of Bob's co-workers. We departed from Heathrow that Thursday night and arrived the next morning in Nairobi. After filling out our Kenya arrival cards and swine flu papers, we made it through immigration in about an hour. Three $25 Kenyan Visas later, we picked up our luggage at baggage claim and excitedly met Mary Muhara from Africa Rising at international arrivals. ...

What We’ll Be Doing in Kenya & Uganda

admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:57:00 +0000

From June 25th through July 5th I'll be in Kenya and Uganda with Jess Shorland and Bob Phoenix. The purpose of our trip is to:

Visit the non-profits that The Humanity Campaign and iContact have provided funds to in order to see and document how they are using the funds and to learn about their operations and needs;
Find additional qualified non-profits for The Humanity Campaign to invest in;
Find companies with unique innovative technologies that address local social needs and for-profit companies with a social mission to invest in;
Learn as much as we can about conflict resolution, IDP camps, food and water distribution, rural health care provision, and rural primary and secondary education; and
Dance, dance, and dance some more like Matt from Where The Hell is Matt!

On our first day in Nairobi we'll be meeting with Amon Anderson from the Acumen Fund and Mary Muhara from Africa Rising. Amon is a friend of mine from back when we went to UNC together and from when he was in charge of the entrepreneurship minor at UNC. Mary is the in-country local representative for Africa Rising who vets the non-profits that Africa Rising contributes to. Mary will be taking us to visit TULIP Nairobi a program supported by AR. TULIP "strives to deliver hope for girls subjected to poverty and its vices: teenage pregnancies, HIV/AIDS, drugs, crime, and prostitution." On day two in Nairobi we'll be visiting with Carolina for Kibera. CFK works in Kibera, a slum in North Nairobi to "promote youth leadership and ethnic and gender cooperation in Kibera through sports, young women's empowerment, and community development." CFK was started in 2001 by a UNC students Kim Chapman and Rye Barcott. Rye has since completed five years of service as an officer in the Marines and completed a MBA/MPA joint degree from HBS and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, which is what I'd love to be doing in a few years. They operate a soccer league, medical clinic (Tabitha Clinic), and a reproductive health and women's rights center (Binti Pamoja). I'm so excited to be seeing their operation first hand. On day three, we'll be flying from Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta Airport to Entebbe, Uganda. We'll stay the night in Kampala with our friend Louis Ntale, the brother-in-law of Duke's Christopher Kigongo, and then wake up early to catch the five or six hour Posta Uganda bus from Kampala to Gulu and traverse once again the adventurous roads of rural Uganda. Upon arriving in Gulu we'll be meeting up with Andrew Morgan of Invisible Children. Over the past ...

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What We Did in Africa

What We’ll Be Doing in Kenya & Uganda