Thursday, May 28, 2009

Getting to Addis

My partner, Frank Schott and our partners Save the Children have commissioned me to produce a blog of our upcoming journey to Ethiopia and Nairobi. That all may sound good to you but get this: I have never read a blog (too busy for busy stuff…) and I have never written one…’til now! So here's my first blog entry.

At O-Dark-Hundred Sunday morning we head for Addis Ababa which might have to be one of the all time great names for a city. I refer to it as Addis Abababababababbaa…in honor of my old friend, the late Steve Agbaba who always introduced himself as Agabababababbaaaa. Okay, all seriousness aside, the purpose of our trip is to work with Save the Children (STC) on the first Soccer Saves pilot project. After three or four plane changes and 447 hours in the air we will arrive in Addis and receive a briefing with the regional STC staff after which we will travel about 2 hours north to Adama for a week of soccer and life skills training exercises.

Yesterday Frank sent me a checklist of what to bring which was much longer than I expected. Frank has been to Africa at least 9,047 times (actually only about 20…) and his experience has been extremely helpful with the program design, interactions with STC and the fun stuff like yellow fever shots, malaria meds, DEET (another great name) and protocol.

Thank you to all for your support -- both financial and words of encouragement. Special thanks to the Soccer Saves team who continue to make amazing progress on the Soccer Saves Golf Classic and the "Roast the Nub" dinner that follows (looking forward to that!!).

Internet connections in Ethiopia may be tricky in places but we will make every effort to give you a day by day recap of this amazing program and the people we meet.

Check back to http://www.soccersaves.org/ for daily updates.

2 comments:

  1. Will you be taking any pictures or capturing video to add to the blog?

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete