The project is alive!

It has been a while since I picked up the pen to write a blog. The main reason for this is that the project has come alive at his fullest. So the last weeks have been passing by very fast. Also the World Cup is fully alive here and we almost do not miss any match. Watching the World Cup over here is quite a weird experience. At home, the Kenyan national television is not able to create a stable program, so they bought the rights of the Ugandan national television. But on this broadcast the president of Uganda is thanked for his amazing achievements in the country and for making the World Cup available for Uganda. Can you imagine that on our national television before every football game a song of Andrea Merkel is broadcasted, about her amazing performances in Germany? . Well I guess you cannot imagine this :P …

For the Dutch games we watch in a pub which is proposed by the HIK (Hollanders in Kenya). But the Netherlands – Australia we had 2 power cuts which caused more than 25 minutes of black screens. And last night against Mexico was even more horrible. When the 1-1 was made, we all jumped and somehow it lost the connection with the television and all screens went on showing snow. We even did not know who scored the goal and also we missed the penalty . Can you imagine 200 Dutch supporters in your bar, missing the penalty. But eventually everybody started to sing instead of being angry, so it was a bizarre atmosphere .

Back to the project, real progress is being made. Last week the musicians presented the song for our platform and this was an amazing achievement. Such creativity of famous stars her in Nairobi. It has become a song from Kenyans for Kenyans. We cannot wait for launching the song into publicity! Also first contact has been made with Safaricom, who are willing to help us launch and promote our platform. We also have a professional photographer on board which has an amazing attitude. A guy with a great heart to help the world, who received recently an award from Christine Lagarde (IMF director) for most promising talent. Right now Maurice Raemakers and Lieuwe Ramaker to make video footages. Maurice is making a documentary about us and Lieuwe is going to create 3 or 4 movies. A documentary about a positive speaker who tells about her life with HIV. About the challenges, but also about the possibilities. Second documentary is about getting tested on STI’s and HIV in a clinic. We will visit a clinic and tape a boy and girl who are getting tested. Then the third footage is a video clip for the song that has been created.

Exciting times when our platform becomes more and more real and more and more it is getting the shape we want it to have. We are almost at the half of our project, so it’s nice to see the progress. We also have nice weeks ahead of us. This morning Lieuwe has arrived as first of our visitors. Than end of July Riewerd & Iris are coming and then in August Marleen, Robbert and Henri. We are really looking forward to all of these visits. We believe also time will fly coming weeks.

For now, I want to wish everybody a lovely World Championship and hope the Dutch can do what they didn’t in 2010! Exciting times!!

Ro