Through GlobalEyes

Hi Veronica,

Hope you both had Merry X-Mass and happy new year. For ourselves we had good and peaceful festive. I have herewith attached document for the financial statement for October and November 2006. Sorry for the delay in sending it, I had expected to give an earlier version in hard copy to Margee during her visit here, but when we did not meet I felt it was better to update it to update it and include issues for whole of November.

The status with co-financing by Onemen as I understand it is that there is a requirement that Tropical Focus explains how the vehicle will be maintained if Onemen provide funds for purchase. So we are requesting if GlobalEyes could help us raise such funds (amounting to about Kshs. 60,000/u003d). Not necessarily that the funds be availed already but so long as there could be the commitment. In our view, since we already have transport expenditures on ongoing activities such as purchases for CRM and Obede activities, we could lamp these together with budget for the planned projects of outreach feeding/livestock and tailoring then outline these as the commitments for maintenance of the vehicle. We thought this could work since the vehicle is requested for use on these projects, for which such expenses are already ongoing.

About the latrine at Obede, the latrine the amount of funds required if deducted from the funds raised, would too little to accomplish substantial work. In addition, we are currently in need of funds for activities that are already ongoing – support to CRM orphans. It is preferable to address these first then plan the rest for future fundraising. We also don’t recommend that purchase of mosquito nets be shelved, because the nets are quite important for control of malaria which is much higher than HIV in causing deaths especially among children yet poor households (as the poor guardians of HIV/AIDS orphans that we target) rarely use their meager income on such purchases.

For recruitment of volunteers from university students, it was not successful since we could not meet fares or accommodation needs for those that were interested.

On the tailoring and the food/livestock exchange, we did not do any further updates on the drafts since sending them to you, however we can work on any additions if necessary.

I’m still collecting the additional information you needed on the tailoring and the food/livestock exchange projects – most relevant offices are resuming from 3rd January 2006.

So far, the computer is working quite well. It’s quite fast once working within a document, but I’ve noticed that sometimes it takes comparatively longer time to open folders and programs. Again, it refused to open Excel files that I pasted from my flush disk, including financial statement for Oct & Nov which I had to redo again (may be some viruses from where I had done them).

Best regards,

Tobias.

NB: Would it be fine to send receipt for Jessica’s contribution by mail or do we wait and pass it to Margee when she comes in February?