One month to go at the Pastoral Women's Council

Sponsored girls at Emanyata School, managed by PWC

Time has gone super fast since I wrote on my first month's experience at PWC. The pace hasn't really let up at all but I'm grateful for the experience in so many areas of programme management; establishing HR systems, recruiting, creating a fundraising strategy, writing proposals, donor reports, the Annual Narrative Report, organisational strategy and generally trying to get the PWC documents I inherited into a more workable system.

We moved the office at the end of February from town to a much quieter, more pleasant area near to the airport. We now have a mama who makes delicious lunches (beans and rice, pilau) and the caretaker Lucas makes the morning chai and is generally fabulous. He and his family live next door and they are also Masaai but from Monduli district which is closer to Arusha (PWC mostly works in Loliondo and Longido districts).

A highlight for me has been the recruitment of a new sponsorship officer. Lucia is from the village where Emanyata school is based, and was herself sponsored to go to MaaSae Girls secondary school in Monduli. This school was established by the father of some friends from church and has just celebrated 20 years. She later went on to complete her sixth form studies at another school in Arusha and then  an undergraduate degree in Community Development. She is passionate about girls receiving the same opportunities she did, and I'm confident the sponsorship programme will flourish under her direction. PWC is receiving more sponsorships from individual donors, and a challenge for the future will be more personalised communications between sponsor and student.  Lucia and I also enjoyed a visit to AfricAid who work with sponsored girls but in a different way: http://www.africaid.com/kisaproject The Kisa Project Director was also a sponsored girl who went to school with Lucia - another wonderful result of girls sponsorship!

A definite lowlight these past few months was discovering that there was no editable copy of the constitution for the process of amendment to add an important new article. This involved typing all 18 pages out from scratch. I'm pretty familiar with the organisation now..

Now I'm at the final countdown to handing over to the new Programme Manager, after which I'm free to head home to the UK! It will be sad to say goodbye to my colleagues and to not be directly involved in such a great grassroots organisation, but looking forward to the next challenge!