“Back to Africa”

13 March 2017, 05:22 am
Speciality Bites by Paul Hargreaves

I’m writing this week’s blog from Western Kenya, where I am visiting our project and planning to try and make the children’s centre (orphanage and schools) more self-sufficient

For those who don’t know, we are doing this primarily by investing funds into a farm business. Now, you cry, what does Paul Hargreaves know about farming? And the answer is, “A lot more than I used to”. In particular, the challenges associated with farming in a poor area, with extremes of weather. We make progress but slowly, and it is always wonderful to be here anyway inspiring and being inspired by the children and young adults.

As those who have been with me in the past will testify, we generally come to places like this to try and help, but end up coming back more changed ourselves. It’s amazing how all those first world problems disappear if you live on-site here for a few days. Those feelings we all sometimes try to push away of feeling “unlucky” or “everyone’s against us” or “it’s okay for them” funnily enough tend to be banished when here! Some of the stuff we worry about really doesn’t matter at all. It’s going to be a tough week here and currently the spending is higher than the resources coming from the UK and the profit generated from the projects. We need to make some decisions, but very difficult, if not impossible, to turn away orphans at the door. If you have any spare cash knocking around, then please do contact me.

In other news, it is nearly the busiest time of the year for shows, there are plenty coming up over the next couple of months. At these we can have a nice day out meeting our contacts or we can plan a little more strategically and bring benefit back to our businesses. The same applies to the “sellers” too. I remember a company with a stand at IFE who were chuffed to bits that they had given away 10,000 sausage pieces at IFE. I said to them that they must have a great database now, and they replied that they hadn’t been capturing customer’s details!

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