Why I am going...

I have been accepted to volunteer in Kenya, Africa as a business coordinator to help set up two women’s cooperatives through as non-profit called Village Volunteers (www.villagevolunteers.org). They are a US registered 501(C)(3) nonprofit organization based out of Seattle, WA. This is a lifelong dream that started back in 1998 while I was visiting Ghana as part of a mission team and was amazed by the African people doing all that they could with nothing and they always did it with a smile. As I stood in a concrete block building watching children sit on the dirt floor doing their math problems in the dirt with sticks, the thought ran through my mind that if I was ever unencumbered I wanted to come back and do what I could to help. A year and a half later I went to Kenya on vacation with a good friend to see the animals of Africa and again those same thoughts ran through my mind.

FAST FORWARD TO SEPTEMBER OF 2011-I was up late one night watching "Oprahs' Most Memorable Guests". A story was introduced about a woman who lived in Botswana who had 5 children and lived with an abusive husband. She had 4 dreams and wrote them dowm and put them in a can. She buried that can in the jungle outside her village and when things got tough she woudl go to that can and pray that she woudl be able to accomplish those dreams. The dreams were to go to high school, college,get a masters degree and then a doctorate..she did all of that and was inroduced by Oprah on that show. I was dumbstruck as to how she had ever accomplished that. She wanted to build a school in her village and Oprah donated 1,000,000 dollars for her to do that. This is where it gets interesting. She showed a picture of the school that she went to and the chills ran up my spine as it was a twin of the school I had stood in 13 years before IN Ghana. That statement I had made came rushing back in to my head and that was the beginning of the journey.