Julliet Makhapila's project - visibility

Updated January 2013

Julliet is a Kenyan living in London. She set up a small feeding programme for children in her home village, from her own pocket, admistered by the local headmaster, and with careful monitoring. There have been fringe benefits and some local people are sufficiently impressed to put in their own money to enable it to reach more children. She wants of enable more replication and to share lessons learned from this project. She has tried to create a website, but struggles to know what part of her story to tell and how to tell it.

The initiators

Julliet Makhapila and Pamela McLean

Write-up by

Pamela McLean

The backstory

Julliet started a project in her home village in Kenya while she was living in London. It is thriving. She wants to make it more visible and replicate it.

The catalyst

Julliet and I met through Steve Podmore, and when Julliet explained about her problems setting up a website I suggested we should explore making her work visible here

Timeline 2012

• July 2012 - We agreed to experiment with visibility here until the end of the year. By then we will know if it suits Julliet to write regular blogs here about her work, as Nikki does for Fantsuam Foundation.
• January 2013 - We had learned that our first idea of Julliet writing blogs here wouldn't work for varios reasons. We had therfore changed to having face to face meetings, with the idea that during such meetings we would capture something online, even if it was only a single tweet.
• January 2013 - I wrote my first blog with Julliet, by persuading her to let me publish the programme of an event that she had organised last year. When she saw it online she suggested an immediate follow-up blog with comments that she wanted to write.
• January 2013 - Julliet and I went to Westminster Hub together. At "Mix at Six" we happened to meet someone who became interested in Julliet's work, and we were all delighted that she could read something online.
• February 2013 - Julliet learned to contirbute to First Thursday - we went there to practice the day before the meeting. We spoke on the phone while Julliet was getting the idea of typing messages to me insted of talking them. Julliet wrote so much that we were able to copy and paste it elsewhere and then start to edit it down into a blog. Andy Broomfield set up "Julliet's Blog" in readiness for the edited down version.

The ongoing story

We have agreed to start off by emailing each other and publishing the emails, to see if that grows naturally into blogging.

Collaborators

Just us so far

Future vision

Jullet hopes to share her vision for the project in Kenya, My vision is for helping people like Julliett to share their work easily.

Learning issues

Julliet is a Kenyan who speaks several languages. Like many oher Kenyans and Nigerians I know, she is happier with spoken English than with written English. I need to learn how to help her develop confidence in blogging here.

We have created the structures for sharing information about projects here on Dadamac.net through our work in Nigeria with John Dada. However the input of Nikki Fishman has been key to our success in sharing John's work. Is it possible to do anything similar without Nikki?