For practical reasons, we have decided to visit the Netherlands for two weeks; Kamiel’s family is there, and some unfinished paperwork. Add the fact that Dutch is his native tongue, so he can use the thing on media and potential supporters of Charity Travel. Plus we might get a chance to chime in with protests against some radical new Dutch laws. We’re planning to move on to Kenya around February 20.
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| The Weather Forecast says it will be much colder |
After almost three months in Turkey, the maximum time Kamiel hopes to be allowed on his visa, it is time to move on. We really like this city and hope to be back one day. While in Istanbul, we have worked hard and can afford the East Africa adventure. We think this is important: It would be strange to place ourselves in a position of dependency while claiming to help people’s initiatives in Africa with our Expertise and Skills. So, Yeon worked on promoting her book and Kamiel updated some stuff for our social ‘community of empathy‘). We stayed in Kasimpasa, Kadikoy, and Moda, took afternoon walks along the shore, visited some fancy cafés, enjoyed mantu, cigköfte, helva, and other delicacies,
The plan for Kenya is tentative, and we are contacting people in Nairobi and Kisumu. We would like to connect grassroots projects through kindmankind.net (the website we have improved a bit while in Istanbul), visit projects for our partner Amaidi (Kamiel is officially their media ), and travel south towards Cape Town, but that’s another chapter.
In Amsterdam, we hope to visit some organisations, media houses, journalists, activists, artists with potential fascination for our ‘mission’ of connecting the least connected, the website we’ve been creating, and our own ’tool’ of development theatre. The longer-term perspective will be focused more strongly on theatre and education, with the platforms, networks, connections activity in the background (at some point, it has to sustain itself so that its original incubators can move on). We will also spend some time in Utrecht in Brabant, arranging some exciting family visits/reunions.
If you, dear reader, are in Amsterdam, and would like to meet us, please get in touch!