As for the point of our project, at first, we were interested in helping children, - for education mainly- or in helping with the water problem in Africa or in something with health. These were the main points we wanted to think about to direct our project.
Then, starting from here we realized we had no idea what to do next, lol, so we started to look for organizations and contacts we could find, in France at first so that they could give us contact in Africa (we had made our mind for Africa but we didn't know yet where exactly).
We met several person, and finally one of them gave us the address of Father Nicolas. We wrote a first letter to him, and sent it by "normal" mail. It took long to get an answer, like 2 months, but he finally answered to me by email, which was a better way then to communicate. We started to exchange our ideas and his suggestions to finally come to a common consent : we would come to repaint the boarding school he is taking care of for a time, and then we would join a "spiritual" camp with young catholic Nigerians for 9 days.
Since we planned a one-month-camp, we decided to spend the last week with the local scouts in the end of the trip.
But as you can guess, to have contacts is not enough to make such a project, so we had to work to make it possible.
Mainly during the first year, and still a little during the second year, we worked to make money. We sold cakes at the end of the mass, calendars, branch for the Palm Sunday, roses for the Mother's day, roasted chestnut (after suffering a lot to collect them trying not to get pricked) after a celebration in a monastery, worked as waiter in marriage and village's celebrations, repainted houses, cleared gardens from their thorny bushes… I think that's all *ponders* yup, probably, I think I didn't forget anything.
During this second year (2003-2004), we really focused on the communication with Father Nicolas, with James who is living in France but had been living in Niger for many years and gives us advise, with the scouts in Niger (we had some problem to contact them at first). We prepared the details with them mostly. We had to go to 3 camp which was a gathering of many groups like us and of leaders (or responsible persons if you prefer). These gathering lasted a weekend, and they were very useful to learn things, like what papers we had to make, what things we had to think about, things like the vaccines and safety precautions or to organize the project better and to see what was ok and what was not, what we had to do quickly and what was not urgent. We also had another adult to look over our project, which was interesting because he wasn't involved as much as our anirels (cf. the group page for "anirels") and told his opinion on everything.
I think I made a quite complete summarize of it all, I don't want to make it too long and boring so next page now. :-D
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