Imani Project at Portland Barefoot Soccer Tournament

The Imani Project was once again invited to be a presence at the annual Portland Barefoot Soccer Tournament, held on Sunday, June 8 at Concordia College. 

 

The Portland Barefoot 3v3 small-pitch event is both a tournament and a festival, with the goal of teaching young people about global HIV/AIDS.   Around 520 children participate, and over 1,500 people attend the tournament. 

 

 

 Internationally, Grassroot Soccer is an HIV prevention program that uses the power of soccer to educate, inspire and mobilize communities to stop the spread of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. Already, over 630,000 adolescents and teens have graduated from the program in 16 African countries. At the Portland tournament, there were appearances by the Portland Timbers, the Portland Thorns, African drumming and music groups, and many community organizations. 

 

There was also an opportunity for the grown-ups to play bubble soccer, in which each player’s body from the knees up is encased in a big plastic bubble; it’s pretty hilarious to play, and to watch. 

 

This is the second year that the Imani Project has had a booth at the Portland Barefoot Soccer tournament. 

The Imani Project Booth

We raised a little money selling crafts we brought back from Kenya, but more importantly, our presence gave people at the tournament a chance to talk about, and to learn about the global scale of HIV/AIDS, and about the work the Imani Project is doing in Kenya.  It was great fun to be there, to watch the kids play, and to talk with all the people who stopped by the Imani Project booth.  I can’t wait to do it again next year!

There's Lots of Silliness

If you want to know more about the tournament, you can go to www.portlandbarefootsoccer.org.

Virginia Scott, IP Board Secretary

Bellevue, WA teenagers count 50,000 pills for the Imani Project!

A church youth group in Bellevue, Washington held a service project for the Imani Project to help prepare supplies for the Imani Project's upcoming trip to Kenya to conduct medical clinics in remote villages. 30 teens and 10 adults from the Cougar Mountain Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints assembled in the church's gym. 

Some counted ibuprofen and acetaminophen tablets and put 30 tablets in a bag.  Others cut zinc tablets in half and put 10 halves in a bag.

The pills are included in Health Kits that are distributed to Kenyans in rural villages who attend classes taught by the Imani Project and who come to clinics for medical treatment.

All together, the group counted the following:

Ibuprofen            32,790
Acetaminophen 325mg   4,500
Acetaminophen 500mg  10,140
Zinc                  2,825
Total                50,255
Wow!  That was a good night's work!  Thank you!

North Bend, WA volunteers help prepare for September Medical Clinics

Volunteers cutting zinc tablets

On April 26, members of the North Bend Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints gathered to count band-aids and pills for the Imani Project. 30 members of the congregation, located in North Bend, Washington, spent over 70 hours working on supplies for our September, 2014 trip to Kenya.  Adults and teens from seventeen families joined us for 1-3 hours on a Friday evening.  It was a great opportunity to socialize and count, count, count and bag, bag, bag!

In their 70 hours, the volunteers:

• Counted and bagged 29,600 band-aids of various sizes
• Cut 4205 zinc pills in half
• Counted and bagged 8410 zinc halves

In September, the Imani Project is travelling to remote villages near the coastal city of Malindi, Kenya to conduct medical clinics,  On that trip, they will distribute 800 health kits to families who attend health classes and clinics.

Well done! Thank you!  The North Bend Ward congregation has planned another service project for the Imani Project in North Bend on May 30 at 7:00 PM at the North Bend LDS church building.  Everyone is welcome to join the effort!

Counting and bagging band-aids

Counting and bagging band-aids

Zinc time!  Cutting, counting and bagging

Thank you letter from the International School

We got a nice letter from the students at the International School of the Bellevue (Washington) School District, thanking us for talking to them about the Imani Project in Kenya and letting them help with the upcoming trip!

International School of Bellevue Helps the Imani Project

The Imani Project is working to prepare for our September, 2014 trip to Kenya to run medical clinics in the remote villages near the coastal city of Malindi.  We are taking 800 health kits with us to distribute to families who come to the clinics. We need a lot of pills and band-aids counted and bagged and pamphlets folded to get ready.  We have been getting a lot of help with this enormous task!

Diane and Phil Garding gave a slide-show presentation on the Imani Project medical clinics that we conducted in 2012 to twenty-one students from the International School of Bellevue, Washington.  The students then spent the evening helping prepare materials for the 2014 trip.  In ninety minutes, the students did the following:

• Folded and counted 820 first aid pamphlets 
• Folded and counted 1000 diarrheal disease pamphlets
• Counted and bagged 12,000 cotton swabs
• Counted and bagged 4302 cough drops
• Counted and bagged 5880 acetaminophen pills

Thank you!

New web site, back to the blog

Imani Project friends:

It has been a while since we've posted to this blog. It's not that we have not been busy -- just the opposite. Since the last post, we prepared for and made two trips to Kenya, we had a party for our supporters, we have had fundraisers, we have funded scholarships for Villagers to go to school, and so much more.   We have not spent as much time communicating with our supporters as we wanted, but we are changing that. 

The biggest change is to rewrite our website (http://www.imaniproject.org) from the ground up.

As you may know, our previous website had fallen out of date, and the cost and technical complexity of keeping it updated became an obstacle.  We decided to take a new direction, and recreate the site using tools that we could manage on our own without outsourcing the development. 

We spent the last two months rewriting the pages, updating the orphan descriptions and photos, uploading videos, and getting it all working.  This has taken the work and cooperation of the entire Board of Directors and others. It isn't finished; we will continue to evolve the design and add more information and photos. We hope that you like the new look and navigation, but even more, we hope you find it easier to get information about the Imani Project and our efforts in Kenya. 

The new site is built using Xara Web Designer 9 Premium, which provides a visual design interface for laying out pages  The biggest challenge was to create the page that lists the 90 sponsored orphans in such a way that we can regenerate the page easily when orphan information and photos change (which they do often). We hit on a solution where we keep our master list in a Microsoft Word document for easy editing. We use Word's mail merge to transform the data into a table, and then save the result as an HTML page. After a few search and replace actions in the HTML page, it is ready to publish. The whole process takes about 30 minutes, and no hand coding of the web page is needed!

We hope you like results if our efforts. Please look at the website, share it with your friends, and send us feedback on what else we can do to help you stay connected with your Kenyan friends.