A Day At Mentorship
Posted on | October 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Hi Everybody, my name is Enele (Enele Denise Mankhi in full) and I am the new Communications Officer at PING. I realize that I have some big shoes to fill but hey, a great challenge is what I love! For my first blog, I wanted to briefly write about my very first experience with the youth mentorship programme, as this was what initially attracted me to the organization.
Before I came on as an employee of PING, I attended a mentorship session just to get a feel of what happens at the organization (the staff etc.) and find out more about the Youth Leaders Mentorship Program. I had always wished to volunteer my time to such a cause, so I jumped at the opportunity. I had checked out the website to find out about the programme and learned that its purpose was to teach computer skills to young people to empower them to be creative enough to find innovative solutions to problems that exist in society. The sessions are held at Botho College (formerly NIIT) until PING sets up their own computer lab.
Getting to Botho College, I was very anxious, scared and excited all at the same time as I had no idea what to expect – sort of like your first day at school. The emotions began to subside once I got into the classroom with all the teens. I was assigned to work with 3 students: John, Tshepza and Anne*. John is in his last year of primary school, Tshepza in his 1st year of senior high school and Anne in her 1st year of junior high school. They all possess basic typing, internet surfing and Microsoft Word skills. I noticed that even though they had some knowledge of typing, they typed quite slowly and thus were given a typing exercise to complete; and I learnt that this happens at most mentorship sessions so they can improve. The teens were so eager to learn and I was very impressed by this. I assisted them where necessary as they enthusiastically went about doing the subsequent exercises given to them. During the lesson, the students were also asked questions from material they had learnt from previous lessons and were rewarded each time they answered correctly or sometimes incorrectly. This encouraged all of them to participate and what better way of learning than through trying?! I am happy to say that my “team” did get quite a few candy treats as they participated a lot. After some time I sat back and watched as the students got into the rhythm of the exercises. All that was going through my mind at that point was how humbling this experience was for me because we take the things that we know and the skills we possess for granted.
What the PING staff is doing for these future leaders is really GREAT! Not only are we (I can say “we” now) making a difference in the lives of the people through all our tech projects but we are moulding leaders of the future to take over and come up with more innovative ways to combat all the problems in the community. I really look forward to working at PING for a long time to come because the altruism of the staff there is totally beyond admirable.
(*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of our students)
Last Words
Posted on | July 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment
It seems like only yesterday when I first set foot at PING. I still remember the overwhelming cloud of incompetency that hung over my head those first few months. However, the combination of my positive outlook on challenges and the great support of PING staff made it very easy to deal with the transition phase.
I was very eager to learn and, even more so, to prove myself. I remember I would jump at any
opportunity to lead a new project, write a new proposal or foster a new partnership with other local organizations. I dare say a week hardly passed without me making suggestions to improve on a project or try a new approach to something we were doing. Such passion should never be lost or strangled. I am happy that at PING it was applauded. Whenever I had an idea and was in doubt, Katy would quote Thoreau: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” And so I have learned to substantiate the feasibility of my ideas before sharing them.
PING has changed in so many ways. When I started there were only eight of us. The workload was light, and the atmosphere was relaxed and informal. However, in the past few months the staff has grown, the amount of work has increased-which is a great thing, and the atmosphere, while still relaxed is a bit more formal. And these are great changes.
As I leave this place to pursue my college studies at Williams College in the U.S., I will take with me so many lessons learnt: some mastered and others in the process of. Nevertheless, I am grateful for all of them. I will miss PING dearly especially the awesome leadership of my superiors, Katy and Ziada, and hope that I will work with them again in the future.
The Origins of PING
Posted on | April 14, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Katy Digovich, a founder and the Director of Operations for PING, tells the story of what inspired the idea for PING, how the organization got started and how PING got to where it is today.
The seeds of PING were planted in the summer of 2007, I had just finished my junior year at Princeton and had traveled to Southern Africa for the first time in my life to gather data for my senior thesis on people living with HIV and ARVs (antiretrovirals – drugs used to treat HIV) in Botswana. I picked Botswana initially specifically because it was an excellent place for me to gather data, it currently has the second highest HIV prevalence in the world, but once I got there I fell in love with Bots, it is a laid back place, with friendly people that have a strong sense of family and community. Botswana is seen as one of the success stories of Africa, a country with natural resources (diamonds) that escaped the resource curse experienced by many African countries and that has had a stable democratic government since it’s founding. On my first trip I couldnt help but notice how many people had cell phones, I will always remember watching a woman walk by yelling at someone on the phone that she pressed against her ear with one hand as she angrily waved another unused phone in her free hand. Seeing all these phones everywhere combined with working in clinic talking to patients gave me an idea for a project that would send HIV positive patients pill reminders, doctor appointment reminders and lab test results via SMS, which could allow them to ask questions to get information and also provide them with messages offering emotional support and encouragement. I discussed the idea with some friends in Botswana, including a very handsome Motswana software engineer that I had met named Lesedi Bewlay. Lesedi told me that a system that could be designed with all the functionality I wanted very easily and we joked about doing the project together. A few weeks after our discussion I got back on a plane for New Jersey to return to school for my senior year.
During my last year at school I attended a information session about a grant opportunity that would cover one year’s worth of living expenses to implement a project of your choosing (in the areas of public health, education and the environment). At the end of the meeting people were asked to give suggestions on projects they might be thinking of applying for. Not planning to apply I casually raised my hand and mentioned my old idea from Botswana. I was surprised to see the young man leading the session look impressed, he said my idea sounded great and encouraged me to submit an application. A few months later I had won a really amazing fellowship, called the Compton Mentor Fellowship, offered by the Compton Foundation. This fellowship would cover my expenses for traveling to Botswana and implementing the idea: the cell-phone based support, reminder and information system for HIV positive patients with Lesedi (who would build the system) and Dr. Harriet Okatch (a local professor at the University of Botswana, who would mentor me and help oversee the project). My initial plan after graduating was to do this cell-phone project for a year and then apply to medical school. But of course things never go according to plan…
When I got back on the ground in Botswana I realized that this project would be impossible to pull off with only three people so I ended up recruiting some wonderful individuals to be the core of the “project team” that Lesedi and I would lead. These people included Yasemin Kimyacioglu, Prentiss Darden, William Scheffers and Rajit Sigh. We also recruited “project advisors”, individuals with experience and connections in the areas that we wanted to work to give us advice on our project and help us when we got stuck. We eventually got the full support of the Ministry of Health as well as brought on the biggest telecom in Botswana (Mascom) as a partner for the project. The only thing missing was more funding, my Compton money was not nearly enough to cover expenses for the whole team needed to create the project, but eventually the project was promised additional funding from a donor that would allow us to buy equipment, rent offices and pay staff. Months came and went and although we had the buy in of all the crucial stakeholders and the technology developed and ready to deploy, the funding did not come. During that time we hustled. We worked out of a house that most of us lived in and went to cafes to work during the day so we could use the internet. Almost everyone had a part or full-time job to help pay for rent, food and electricity. We would meet during people’s lunch breaks and late at night. It was a scary time but an awesome one because you knew that everyone was there for the simple reason that they believed in what we were doing. There was no salary or benefits keeping them there, no strict boss to make them show up on time, people were just driven by the raw desire to build something that would make a positive difference and open to exploring the best ways of achieving that goal.
During the “hustle time” we made two key decisions that would impact the future of PING. The first was that we officially formed an organization, a non-profit which we called the “Botswana Association for Positive Living- BAPL” (a name that the officer at the registration of companies picked out for us). The initial purpose of forming the organization was just to have a legal entity to enter into contracts with with other partners and stakeholders in the project but in reality forming BAPL allowed us to take on additional mobile health projects with ease and to be recognized as a legitimate entity. The second was that since our project was delayed we would often volunteer with other organizations in the area that worked with orphans and vulnerable children. Working with this group of youth face to face allowed us to see first hand their creativity, problem solving ability and determination to over come obstacles and got us wondering how many more opportunities they would have if they were equipped with a strong set of IT skills. Out of this experience the PING highschool and college mentorship programs were born.
The entity that is in existence today feels so far away from the BAPL and the sole original project from a few years ago. Besides the initial name change to the more fitting PING this organization has an office with twelve staff, three interns, seven mobile health projects, three youth programs, an impressive list of partners and donors and a defined vision. But if PING ever encounters hard times in the future we will always have our roots to look back to. We know we can get through tough times because we have been there before, we know how to hustle and how to improvise and most importantly, we are still made up of individuals that are driven by that raw desire to build something that will make a positive difference and are open to exploring the best ways of doing just that.