::WHAT THE HELL DID I DO IN KENYA:: RECAP!
on Alejandra Barahona (Kenya), 17/Jun/2011 07:04, 34 days ago
A few more days and we will be off to some long vacations cruising around Asia… every journey we make leads us to another door, every city we pass by leaves it's mark and changes our perspective of the world bit by bit. Sometimes we find ourselves all over again and sometimes we loose a bit of what we thought made us who we were. This time it was Kenya's time to host us for one year, in paper it was two years and that was the plan but plans always change once you start executing them… It was definitely an experience we'll never forget, ups and downs, lefts and rights… we came with the ideology to help a bit, share our little knowledge and experience so that people at the organizations we were placed at could continue afterward… but things are never easy, you always encounter people with hunger to succeed and sometimes you just meet people who just don't want to be bothered and in both cases you just have to try to make the best out of it and that's what we did… We helped the ones who wanted to be helped and even though we wished we could have done more, we'll just leave this country glad of at least have helped one or two….Anyways, so I was in charge of the design department of Likoni Quality furniture…. Design department meaning me, and by design meaning having to deal with marketing, advertisements, website, product design and even dealing with clients… it was a mouthful of things and nobody to help me… pissed as hell I started my placement last July, feeling like I was taken advantage of, things were not clear for my partner organization, for them a volunteer felt like a good deal, so they got rid of their designer and brought me in, which shouldn't be the case because this thing is supposed to be sustainable, you come, you train, you implement and then someone else continues doingthe job but if there's nobody else then there's no point, as soon as you leave things go back to how they were before and you loose a year of your life….It took me a couple of months to have management approve high speed internet installation which was going to help me with e-marketing and the build up of thewebsite… Four months for the approval of a digitalcamera so we could document installations, production and new pieces…Six months for the approval of a computer purchase for the department (Doing furniture plans by hand is still very much alive) equipped with some adobe programs… eight months to finally bring in an intern I could train and ten months to find a grant to build up a resource library equipped withmore than 30 books about design, econometrics, standard furniture measurements, interiors, etc…One year it took me to put everything together and leave a well equipped design department…. it was not easy but I can say I'm leaving something behind and that my job was done… One year with a lot of work and for everyone who still wonders what the hell I was doing in Kenya, here it goes: Besides equipping the design department, training someone a bit on every aspect of design and leaving a resource library, I also did their website, catalog, brochures and other stationary… did all their graphics for advertisements in magazines and newspapers, laid out their newsletters and e-blast once a week for a year… did furniture proposals for around 20 clients, helped them with thedecoration of their booth in the 4th Mombasa Homes Expo which won the first price for best "Interior decoration" in the show… did some manuals for one of their kids' wheelchairs and advised them on how to make them a bit more friendly for children and finished 3 full new lines of furniture, one for children, one for outdoors and one a bit more modern for younger people…. Uffff…this definitely kept me busy, did what I came here to do and now I'm ecstatic to leave…. volunteering… I can scratch that off my list now, will I do it again? probably but next time I will think twice before just embarking myself into a new place. Kenya helped me find myself all over again, I am know pretty sure I don't want to live in a third world country except if it's my own…Anyways, that's what I did for one year in case you all were thinking I was only here on vacations!