I have been blessed to meet the people at Creative Visions http://www.creativevisions.org/ and work with them on two amazing projects! A mutual friend introduced us to each other and during our first conversation we realized that we have some amazing synergies and the desire to share our stories! Creative Visions is a wonderful foundation based in Los Angeles area dedicated to activism supporting humanitarian, social, and environmental issues around the world. At first, because I love Kilimanjaro, we were discussing making a film from the porters' perspectives while climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, but we found that there are many challenges with the Tanzanian government filming porters and filming anything on Mt. Kilimanjaro, so that idea is on the backburner! Because we are trying to coordinate my time there in September to meet up with Karee Maxson, with Creative Visions, who is in Kenya on vacation at the same time, we brainstormed and decided to do a beta film about humanitarian work in Kilimanjaro instead. Karee's expertise is filming humanitarian aide projects and she has traveled the world to tell the stories and bring awareness to impoverished areas! Hopefully, the beta film will go well and we will return together to make a full documentary film!
The second great thing is we are collaborating on is helping orphans in Cura, Kenya at the Cura Orphanage, http://www.curaorphanage.org/. Cura is run by Creative Visions and although we just met, KiliTech has so much in common with Creative Visions and we all get along wonderfully well and we continue to find more opportunity to work together to bring aid to our areas of focus. KiliTech partners with TAREO in Moshi and one of our projects is bringing vocational training to post secondary children and young adults in rural-Moshi so they have necessary skills for jobs and sustainable responsible income. Ironically, the staff at Cura has been discussing bringing vocational training to the orphanage in Kenya to help older children have lifetime jobs, and we are now hopefully able to join efforts! KiliTech and sister partner in Tanzania, TAREO, are delighted to work together with Creative Visions to bring additional opportunity to Cura.
All this is very exciting and we have accomplished a lot in a short amount of time with many wonderful projects and opportunities in front of us! It will be a great two weeks for me there in September and I am very excited about the new adventures in Kenya at Cura!