I don't want to sound like a whiny child, but learning Webbed Empowerment isn't easy :-) It's also exciting and fun. Life is full of both laughter and tears.

Something coming up on October 15 is Blog Action Day . It's a day when bloggers will write on one subject, the environment. I certainly will try to write a blog post for that. Eric Hersman at his blog White African put a call out to feature a post at another project AfriGadget to highlight African ingenuity about the environment.

I plan to write about Opok Farms Village on my blog on Blog Action Day. If people have some ideas to send to Eric, that's a great idea. Something I've noticed about AfriGadget is the articles posted there are linked to very widely. It's a platform which reaches people in many different networks.

I'll try to contact Eric about Opok Farms Village--that means getting my thoughts straight and as you know that's not easy for me. So I'm putting the info out in case others might want to contact him as well. I hope others will write on their blogs on October 15th too. This is an opportunity to tell more people about Opok Farms Village.

Do we have any ties to Watoto? http://www.givemeaning.com/proje ct/Watoto

Let's look into creating a space on www.givemeaning.com

I received the following note from Carol Collado

Carol Collado wrote:

Good for you! Keep up the good work. YOu might want to check out our small grants guidelines. IT sounds as thought your resettlement village could qualify and the deadlines for next year (2008 will probably be up on the website www.childhealthfoundation.org sometime after the beginning of the year.

Best regards Carol

Carol is the Executive Director of Child Health Foundation which acted as the fiscal agent for ICDDR,B hospital in Bangladesh in the Omidyar.net Q4 funding project. Here are the guidelines for 2007. I think we should consider this.

I think that a program of developing deep community and teaching the children deep listening skills and loving speech would qualify as innovative mental health care.

I have posted a $10,000 proposal at givemeaning.com http://www.givemeaning.com/propo sal/OpokFarms

It is in a pending state and needs 100 votes before Nov 30 to go active for donations.

Would appreciate everyone's help.

There have been two more donations to the Opok Farms Project on GiveMeaning.com bringing us to $1,350 toward a goal of $10,000.

For those of you who have not looked at this site and this proposal, it is a proposal to build infrastructure at Opok Farms to enable ongoing workshops to start where the community building can begin that will enable the success of Opok Farms Village.

If you are looking for an end of year contribution or are even just inspired by this project .... please consider making even a small contribution.

Happy New Year for all of us including the orphans in Northern Uganda.