Christinaswwworld Unlimited

It's Blog Action Day today - bloggers around the world are asked to post about poverty. I tend to write about poverty quite a bit anyway, so instead of trying to synthesize all of my thoughts on the subject into one post, I've been working on something a bit different today.... I've pulled some new voices from my world into the dialogue. I'd like you to meet the ourwwworld team - a small global group of new bloggers in your sphere, who are learning together how to blog sustainably and hopefully raise funds for Life in Africa. After a month of practice blogging about the google trends, they've now each got a new look (me too, did you notice?!), and have started posting some great new and original content to their blogs. I encouraged the ourwwworld team to post for Blog Action Day, and here's what they had to say: Awakening , by Grace Ayaa (East Africa) "...When I look at Africa, most of its land is fertile and very good for any kind of agriculture , but th...

Life in Africa community members at WE Center Kampala pose after receiving their Kiva loans (May 2006) As I wrote in an earlier post , working online from Africa has brought me into contact with amazing people who are developing new systems and ideas that offer hope for better times ahead. The folks I've had the pleasure of working with at Kiva.org are an amazing group of really dynamic people who are doing just that. Since I first met them in early 2006, they've made incredible strides in achieving their team's far-reaching vision for building a grassroots driven credit system for the world's poor. Just think for a minute about how cool that is. At the same time as "extending credit to the poor" is being blamed in some circles for bank failures in the USA, my friends at Kiva have successfully created a whole new "system outside the system" for delivering credit to the poor in countries around the world. It occurs to me we ought to start paying ...

The little white guy at yesterday's preschool gala is my Benjamin. He's 4 and loads of fun. Today (October 9) we all got to take a day off to celebrate 46 years of Uganda's independence from British protectorate rule. Uganda was never actually any nation's colony, but the colonial powers put Britain in charge. The Brits pulled out 46 years ago today, but later helped Idi Amin get to power. That always kinda made me go hmmm. This morning the president (who they say paid parliamentarians about $3,000 each to change the constitution so that he can stay in power for life) made a speech about how Uganda will be fine even though the rest of the world is falling apart. In the afternoon, we went to a barbecue with Ugandan friends... and talked about the rest of the world falling apart. I held a captive audience when someone asked me to try and explain how America's housing crisis came to be. They were stunned at the whole subprime mortgage story. Keep in mind, Uganda is ...

Community members at Life in Africa 's webbed empowerment center in Gulu (Northern Uganda) see their own pictures online for the first time, using a locally built solar powered computer (2006). While it sometimes feels like I've spent far too much of the past 10 years online, it's only now that I've actually tried to start a blog. So here I am a newbie once again. Luckily, I am not alone. One of the things I've always loved about the online wwworld is the strong sense of community that you can find out there, if you just know where to look. Over the past week I've been exploring a number of communities for bloggers. I'm excited about what I see. I am accustomed to online communities where you become a member, log in and participate at that community website. Blog building communities, where people are helping each other to learn about and improve their blogging techniques, seem to be a little bit different. With nifty little web 2.0 tools called "widge...

Zarina was my housekeeper for 8 years here in Uganda. She's a widowed mother of 3 who was very down on her luck when I met her. In the early days of Life in Africa I wrote many stories about Zarina, and the things I was learning about Uganda through the lens of her life. She also became involved with various Life in Africa activities over the years, especially whenever I was in the mood to experiment. She was one of the first borrowers in the two loan programs I developed. In 2005 I made her a "star" in a mini fashion show online. I created Zarina's fashion show as an example of how we can think about combining popular cultural content (like African fashion) with promoting a cause (like donating used football clothes to The Kids League). What eventually became the Life in Africa fashion4football campaign included a community fashion event, an online fashion show that featured many Kids League parents, and the delivery of over 40 bales of used playclothes and soccer ...

...out into the great global unknown. Lots of friends have written to ask what's next on my horizon. Many have assumed I'll be headed back to the US. No, that's actually not the current plan. As long as the boys are young (my youngest is 4) our decision on where to live will be shaped primarily by the desire to maintain my childrens' relationship with their dad. He and I have lived separately for many years now. We currently live in separate countries, but have managed to keep up a frequency of contact that keeps him as a very strong presence in the kids' lives. He's a really good dad, so I feel it as a responsibility to the kids to take his location and travel connections into account. He's Dutch, not American. He and I share an interest in possibly living in Asia someday, and the kids are onboard for that as well. Two months ago, I had thought I might try making something work in Thailand (where I spent 6 weeks earlier this year) as a next place to live fo...

... and then there was the time I started a project in an African war zone. My journey into the war-torn heart of Africa's Pearl began with an aim to motivate the members at Life in Africa's WE Center Kampala to join hands behind a cause beyond their own poverty. A community like ours could do something to help the children of Northern Uganda. We held a great fundraising event , we got a contract making bracelets to support awareness of the plight of children in Northern Uganda, and we went to Northern Uganda in small groups to facilitate art therapy workshops with groups of night commuter children and former child-soldiers. After interacting with children at different organizations in Gulu, we'd developed the strongest bonds with one night-commuter center in particular. The volunteers that were keeping the place running were horribly under-resourced. We started thinking about setting up some of our adult community activities there, involving the volunteers and the chil...