The October 10 Group

Year 2011 is now added to the history and I will do a brief summary of the past year. On January 8, Bernt and I travelled to the Congo for two weeks. In Kinshasa, we visited the Swedish Embassy. We then proceeded to Kimpese, stayed over at IME’s guest house and had some meetings with Emy Miantezila. Most of the time we were in Matadi. We followed up the training of the “October 10 Group” and wrote out all the documents for the loans which were then paid out on February 18. Total loan amount was 27 350 U.S. dollars. The instalment of these loans began on July 30 and broadly follows the plan that had been made.

The January 11 Group

For three days we trained a new group of ten entrepreneurs, called the “January 11 Group”, during two days of joint review and a day for individual talks. Their activities are various food production as growing grain, vegetables, poultry farm, pig farming, sewing clothing, car service and shops.They seek together loans of 51,000 U.S. dollars, we hope to be able to grant them 36,000 U.S. dollars. We have not managed to get together the money yet. We are looking for sponsors to lend or give us money so we can fulfil our mission.

The Nsanda Group

On June 3, Bernt and I went back for three weeks to the Congo. The first week we stayed in Kinshasa and worked with the training of twelve Congolese who want to work with the agricultural project Nsanda, many are graduates and nearly all have work in Kinshasa so we had to use Saturday and Sunday for training. Nsanda has become a collective project that we call the Nsanda Group. At our disposal, we have 315 hectares of land. The loan to the Nsanda Group was 16,550 U.S. dollars and was paid in connection with our journey. The first instalment takes place after the first harvest in February, 2012. We visited the Swedish Embassy and showed a Power Point presentation and reported on our activities. We also visited some friends in Kinshasa.

We have many exciting projects coming up: training new groups of entrepreneurs, develop family farms, start training for entrepreneurs in a gymnasium in Matadi, start production of wood stoves, start an import firm for solar cells that can generate power for lighting, cell phones, computers and TV.

On January 30 we will make our next trip to the Congo.

Do you support us in our work? Every dollar we receive goes to our projects. All development of our projects is based on that we can find people and businesses who want to support us.

We are also looking for volunteers to our various projects. Contact us for more information. We need help with both large and small projects.

If your company, club or circle of friends would like a visit from us, we would be happy to talk about what we are doing in Congo.

Now, we wish you all a Happy New Year with many exciting challenges.

For more information about our projects, please read our blogs and the other pages on our web site.