• Thanks ...

Team Reports
• Duncan Macgregor
• George Foster
• Megan Johnson
• Marg Goodchild
• Alan Ingram
• Janice Gillespie

You can also download a PDF version of this report from our Distributions page.

Many, Many Volunteers

Alan Ingram — Peterborough, ON

From Kenya 2008 Photo Album

A unique feature of SCAW is the fact that 100% of every bedkit donation reaches the intended recipient, an impoverished child. This is made possible, in part, by the three categories of volunteers: office, travelling, and overseas.

While the overseas volunteer organization (OVO) is often a service club such as a Rotary Club, the reality is that in performing their duties they enlist hundreds of volunteers from other organizations. The OVO must:

• determine the contents of the bedkit in conjunction with the SCAW office,
• send out tenders for each bedkit item,
• assemble and store the bedkits until distribution day, and
• locate and select the children that meet the SCAW criteria: children aged 6 to 12 years old, equal numbers of boys and girls, and impoverished children in an impoverished country.

On each distribution day they arrange for the same number of bedkits and children to arrive at the designated site and provide sufficient volunteers to make the distribution run smoothly.

To perform these duties, they enlist the help of many other types of volunteers – Rotoractors, Rotary Community Corps, parents, teachers, school councils, religious groups, orphanages, medical personnel, boy scouts, and girl guides — to name a few in the Kenyan distribution.

Alan taking your bedkit photos From Kenya 2008 Photo Album

One agency, but by no means unique, that assisted in Kenya was Kids to Kids, a unique school that hosted 400 children at their school site. They are based on the site of a church designed only for children. Each year they take sixty children who have never been to school or been forced out of school due to an inability to pay for a school uniform in the free public education system. They offer an informal education program for these students for one year with the goal of getting the children back into the public school system.

Just as a child needs a decent sleep to function properly the next day, a child also needs food to perform in school. As such the day begins by feeding the children a breakfast of porridge or tea and bread when they arrive — an incentive to prevent absenteeism. There are two teachers and two group teaching areas; however, the school enjoys the benefit of yet another layer of volunteers: ex-patriates who provide one-to-one tutoring for the children. At lunch, a second meal is served, usually a combination of rice and beans.

From Kenya 2008 Photo Album

After one year in the program, the children are enrolled in the public system and provided with a school uniform, a school bag, and some school supplies. They are monitored for a year, in part by delivering a lunch to them each day at their school — remember the food incentive. The school is run entirely by donations, most from overseas.

Each distribution site finds similar stories often related to orphans, children with single unemployed parents or children with HIV/AIDS.

When you wonder where your donation has gone, realize that while the money has been spent directly on the child, thousands of volunteer hours also make the distribution possible.