Working to Empower

Greetings all:

I’ve made it safely back to Toronto, Canada. The trip went well - it was a lot of travel in a short time but it was nice to see all those places, projects, and people again. For those involved with the sponsorship program, I am going to put together a package as soon as I can (video, photos, report) and for others who are just interested to see a copy, do let me know. Also, WTE is getting a large load of Uganda necklaces, made by the women’s group in northern Uganda, so if you would like to help sell them, please do contact us. 100% of the sales goes back to the women. Thanks for reading along, I probably won’t post as regularly since things are happening as quickly as they do while I am away. But, in the short-term future, we have some volunteers doing work in a couple places and some really interesting new projects. I’ll post about those when I have more to say. As for me - I got off the plane 2 hours ago from a two-day journey from Uganda to Canada safe and sound.

Greetings,

We have completed the 5-country journey! Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, DR Congo, Tanzania, and back to Uganda. It has been a long one with too many buses, but we got lots on film. I am going back to the north of Uganda to check on the students and make sure all is well with their coming school year with fees and supplies. I plan to be back in Toronto in about one week.

All the best,
Logan Cochrane

We arrived in Kigali this morning after an all-night bus. I’ve never been to Rwanda before so don’t have much sense of anything. A very beautiful and lush country regardless our general sense of being lost. The phones for our connection here are not working so we are trying the internet - if that fails we’ll move to Burundi, a place I am familiar with. Currently I am searching an online Atlas to find out where we are - always exciting! Hopefully the phones or email will connect us shortly. All seems to be on plan with the timeline and the permits to enter the camps in Tanzania, so that is good news.

We have come down from the north of Uganda in a flurry of travel and meetings. Tonight we are off to Rwanda by bus. From there we will stop over in DR Congo and pass through Burundi to reach Tanzania. We’ll complete the circle back to Uganda in a couple weeks.

The girls in northern Uganda that WTE is supporting to go to school are doing really well. Great bunch of kids - can’t say thanks enough to their sponsors! They were so happy to have their packages as well. I’ll try to write soon.

Logan

We arrived in Uganda. As we sat in the airport I was thinking that I should have given Shawn more information - turns out he had a huge ordeal of his own, at the end of the day all worked out. We jumped right into filming and completed the part on SOC and featured its project supporting children to attend school, which WTE funds. Tomorrow we are off to the north and will stay there a couple days to film ACDA. This will be a whirl-wind of a trip but I’ll try to keep updating as we move along.

Logan

In Jan./08 I started talking with a film maker about the possibility of creating a documentary on WTE and the wonderful partners that do all the hard work to make their communities a better place. It seems as though this will become reality as I have booked a flight to return to Uganda in June with the film maker and we will visit two parters there as well as a partner in DR Congo and one in Tanzania. This has all come as great news for WTE and we are still connecting with our partners to make this project a reality. WTE did not have funding for this, so if anyone happens to know any donors who would be interested to support this documentary effort please have them contact WTE.

In December of 2007 Working To Empower started to share educational materials with organizations in a network. Each week the organization would send out one educational material. The project started with six partners and English-only materials. A little over a year later this resource sharing network has over six-hundred organizations signed up to receive educational materials. In addition, we created over 70 educational materials that are being translated into twenty-six languages. This project really has expanded well beyond the hope we originally had and the feedback has been amazing. WTE is really proud to report on this project, which would not have been possible without the hundreds and hundreds of hours given to us by our wonderful volunteer team.

This week WTE owes thanks to the Vancouver Montessori school who raised $1200 for the Emebet Education Program in northern Uganda. This will ensure that the additional students for 2008 will attend school, as we had hoped. The fundraiser is the single largest one-day event held by a school – congratulations, and thank you!

WTE is off to a quick start.

Thanks to some wonderful volunteers our website is moving quickly in new and exciting directions. Our resource page grows by the week! A big thanks to those volunteers helping to create and translate those materials too!!

The Emebet Education Program is off to a huge start. Back in October WTE added more students to the Tanzanian program working in Nyragusu refugee camp. All those students are attending secondary school. A new program has just started with twenty new primary students in Kampala (Uganda), while the northern Uganda program has doubled in size this year – we are putting orphaned girls into boarding school because there are no secondary schools where they live. All those fees have been paid thanks to all you wonderful donors and volunteers!

WTE’s resource sharing program has spread to over 40 countries and we send out weekly materials to hundreds of organizations – with 26 languages in translation!

Our hard-working peer educators in refugee camps are continuing their educational efforts – teaching their communities about HIV. This year the Nyragusu team in that Tanzanian refugee camp got bikes so they could cover more area and they have also printed a large quantity of educational material for distribution in local languages. In Benin the United Nations continued to support our peer educators as well.

We have raised almost ¾’s of the money we set a goal for in our Ethiopian project – a children’s home for orphans living with HIV/AIDS.

WTE started up a new project in Cameroon this past year and that project is training peer educators and is also running strong.

Thank you donors, volunteers, and most of all the local people making all these projects run so well.

Logan

Once again I apologize for the delay. WTE’s role here in Ethiopia is somewhat small, we are mostly just a funder and I am working to support the local organization in any and every way that I can – that includes taking care of the kids to writing grant proposals. WTE is moving along though. We are supporting a project in Cameroon that will create a team of female peer educators (we are one of a few funder for that large project). They asked for WTE to supply the core trainer but the cross-Africa flight was out of my personal budget so we couldn’t fill that need, but we are supporting that project financially. It will run for a year starting this coming month. Following that we are in talks with an organization from Mozambique where we hope to work with people who are living with HIV/AIDS and have a train the trainers program for community education. Of course all this takes money so I am searching for ways to find funding – I’ll also come back to Canada this winter (where I’ll speak and hold some events) to help WTE move along.

I uploaded some videos to YouTube (also viewable via the WTE website) make sure to check those out!

All the best,
Logan