Owning the new menu

A manager from my partner organization contacted a volunteer travelling to Mozambique, to have her deliver a couple copies of the finalized menus to me. It wasn’t something I was expecting, and the gesture was greatly appreciated!

Though the team eliminated a couple of menu features designed to accommodate customer concerns and desires (by having different choices for side dishes, and light and full portions), I’m proud of them for taking ownership and accountability for the menu, using wording that keeps things flexible for meat and side options, while one portion size and price will probably make things easier to manage in the kitchen.

Everyone can now feel that this is their menu, and I’m confident that the customers will continue to praise the changes too!

A different kind of housing development

The dangerous dirt road leading to my partner organization’s premises had always been covered on either side by deep bush, but when I came back from holidays in April, it was suddenly cleared.

I found out that hundreds of locals had come over a period of days (partner organization staff included), clearing the land, demarcating small plots of it, and claiming it in hopes of building their own informal settlement. But before anyone could get the thin, uninsulated walls of a tin shack put up (the common form of building low-income housing in Katutura, which heats the place up like an oven in summer, and freezes in winter (where I’ve seen temperatures hit -3C)), the government and police came around warning people they would be thrown in jail if they built on the land.

new funding approved!

I recently got news that the grant proposal I put together to expand my partner organization’s TB craft training and nutritional support program has been approved for the sum of 99,750.00 Euros!! This is a considerable amount of money for the organization, and should allow them to improve the sustainability of an already strong program over the next eighteen months!

I got a message of gratitude from the organization, at the same time letting me know that they have finalized and started using the new menu (with a couple changes), and that ‘Everybody appreciated the design!’ That one sentence makes a lot of the struggles worth the effort, when I can happily feel appreciated for my contributions to a developing organization!