Money Put to Good Use

Money Put to Good Use

When our cousin’s husband passed away, we decided to donate something here that would be helpful. IDF has a projector but no screen. We were showing power points, pictures and videos on the wall. The image was very faded and unclear. We asked if a screen could be purchased. ‘Well, not here but in Yaoundé’. They weren’t long locating one and transferring the money by phone! The screen was here the next day-came on top of a bus no doubt.

We set the screen up in the conference room, admired it (it’s a big one) but didn’t realize its incredible value until we travelled to Bana for Allan’s workshop, Conservation Farming. Here is the room before the transformation began, after they had unloaded the tables from a truck. Where would you project an image?

They used a table cloth to cover the side window. Another time it would be better to take a heavier cloth for a window cover. They used the screen to tape their flip chart prewritten outlines. (Another time it would be better to reverse the screen and use the back side for this to avoid touching the pebbled screen). As you will see, the third slide shows that Allan’s presentation was in French. It took a lot of effort of his part to translate the power point into French, then practice with Oussematou for the presentation. Boo, an agricultural extension officer followed up each slide with animated discussion with the group. Allan’s entire presentation was hand written in French on flip chart paper in case there was no electricity.

Another quite interesting aspect to this was transport of the screen to the remote location. On top of the car of course! Ideas are being put forth as to how to waterproof the screen’s box for transport. The journey was three hours one way and this time without rain. At night, the screen was brought into the hotel room for safe storage.

The screen will be a great feature to enhance conference room rental, to generate much needed income for IDF.

Another income generator has been set up. When we were in Winnipeg this summer, Gail (Allan’s sister) wrote us a cheque and said, ‘Here, put it to good use in Africa’. Again, Oussematou said IDF must survive in order for all the programs to run properly so it was decided that the best approach was an investment that would bring in income for IDF. The decision was made to buy 1200 quality chairs to rent out, mainly for funeral celebrations but also for weddings or other events. The chairs were delivered to IDF in less than a day. 92 steps up to the fourth floor-no elevator here folks! These chairs will be travelling to Wum where they will be rented out from the IDF office in Wum. Wum is a thriving community 3-4 hours from Bana. The last 1/3 of the road is challenging driving to get to Wum. There are no chairs like these in Wum. They are going to rent out the chairs at 75CF each. The chairs cost 12 Canadian each or 5000CF. The quality of these chairs is far better than we buy in Canada. Each chair will have its own number and IDF’s name on it. They have their first contract to rent out the chairs on the Sunday after our send off.