| July 2004 |
Welcome to a short update from Kufunda Village
This update will be a little shorter than usual, as we are working on an invitation to Friends of Kufunda - a new initiative to all of you to join us more fully in our work. I will be sending this out next week. |
| Tandi Community |
| The most exciting to me is that Tandi Community in Rusape will be our first pilot community to pioneer what, as far as we know, is the first community currency in Zimbabwe. With support from Kufunda they will be launching the Tandi Hour at the end of the year. Pam Pedersen has designed the currency which beautifully depicts rural Zimbabwean scenes and images on three different notes: the ½, 1 and two Tandi Hour notes respectively. If we are able to successfully launch the currency, we believe that we will be able to stimulate the local economy by encouraging local trade and exchange. Ambitious and exciting! |
| Return of Gita |
| Gita Sonnenberg is returning in August to join us for 8 months. She will be our first volunteer returning for a longer period of time. She will be supporting team and organizational development, furthering the shift of Kufunda being its own entity, less and less dependent on myself as the founder. She will also be working with our community relations and follow up support to the communities who have been through our programmes. We are all hugely looking forward to her return. |
| Kufunda cooking |
| One of the things Gita did while she was here was to develop a Kufunda cook book based on the food grown here. The shona kitchen is very basic, and if I may say so, not always hugely inspiring. Gita worked with many of the same ingredients, only adding different herbs that are already growing in the Kufunda gardens but not traditionally used here for cooking, to lift and transform the dishes and food. And people loved it. So much that we now have a Kufunda cooking team, spearheaded by Sikhethiwe, Most recently Sikhethiwe catered for Zimpath (an HIV/AIDS organization) who spent two days at Kufunda playing the flowgame. We were a bit nervous about them not being too happy about the all vegetarian kitchen. But they LOVED the food. And Sikethiwe was ecstatic. You are welcome to join us for dinner - any time! |
| Kufunda Open House |
| From August we will be launching a monthly Open house Sunday afternoon, which will be an opportunity for friends of Kufunda and other interested folks to come and spend an afternoon in good company, beautiful surroundings, with good food (!) and traditional entertainment. We look forward to the first of many such gatherings next month. |
| Financial reins |
| In the move towards Kufunda becoming her own entity, I have handed over the financial reins to the new finance taskforce (Fidelis, building co-ordinator; Tsitsi, logistics co-ordinator, and Alec, driver). During the past month my role has shrunk to approving the monthly and weekly budgets, and following up on and checking on the expenditures. They are organizing and managing all of our finances really well, and have taken a huge load of my shoulders, in addition to stepping more fully into their leadership. |
| And finally a word of heartfelt Thanks - |
| To Toke Moeller who has put forward the first contribution to help us buy a mini-bus to be able to drive children from the village and surrounds to school (currently they walk 2-3 hours per day total in getting to and from school), and to enable us to collect Community organizers for programmes. More on this in my upcoming Friends of Kufunda note; |
| To Karen Moeller og Iben Madu who have contributed 100 USD to the Kufunda education fund; |
| To Toke, Monica, Myrtel, Carsten and many others who collected clothes, and carpentry tools, and other good stuff to support people at Kufunda and the communities we work with; |
| To DHL Netherlands who offered us free shipping of the computers that Gita and Hansl in-kinded (and to Gita who made this happen). They are still waiting to be cleared in customs at Harare airport (all the Kufundees are waiting eagerly for their arrival); |
| And to Andy Neal, Satu Kreula, and James Shaw and co, who have decided to do a charity hike in the UK, with proceeds going to Kufunda. |
| Thank you - thank you - thank you! Everyone. You make our work possible. |
| And if others have contributed in the past few weeks in the UK or the US, I still don't have the details of new contributions going in, but thank you, too. |
| Much love and light - and more coming up shortly, |
| Marianne |
