Preparing for East Africa

Preparing for East Africa

11. January 2012. Istanbul, Turkey.

We have been living in Istanbul for six weeks and love this city a lot. But if all goes well, we will move south to Nairobi soon. We are, after all, on a mission. Istanbul has treated us very well and we were able to get ourselves more or less organized for the upcoming journey. In this article I present a tentative plan and our readers are very welcome to comment and suggest alternative itineraries or activities.

We have been living in Istanbul for six weeks and love this city a lot. But if all goes well, we will move south to Nairobi soon. We are, after all, on a mission. Istanbul has treated us very well and we were able to get ourselves more or less organized for the upcoming journey. In this article I present a tentative plan and our readers are very welcome to comment and suggest alternative itineraries or activities.

Our tentative mission in East Africa
(1) To promote kindmankind, the platform for independent changemakers that we have launched in April 2011, we plan to visit relatively accessible yet needy areas in Eastern Africa, including Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. We will use our experience and contacts, the same way we have done during our original Charity Travel, to identify trustworthy, needy, and promising local initiatives. We will visit these projects and initiatives, write about them on this website and in volunteering publications, take photos if they wish so, and connect them to skillful idealists.

(2) We will also visit country teams for volunteering organisation Amaidi to assess their capacity and contribute with our experience in the field to make the recruitment and deployment of assisted volunteers go smoothly.

(3) To reach Capetown. We have heard many good stories about the Western Cape province and this city in particular. In order to get there, we will probably take the train from Tanzania through Zambia and visit Malawi and Namibia. We take our camera and will take a lot of photo's. We want to know Africa good enough to advise and inspire others who play with the thought of visiting this amazing continent. So they are aware of its predicament and can make positive change by contributing their knowledge, skills, or resources.
We plan to live in Capetown for a while, and hang out with the penguins.

* * *

We don't know how long it will take, so what happens after that must remain rather vague. It's something with sailing to South America and looking for a place to settle there, that much we know.

To be continued.