Travel Report

Visit to Congo Brazzaville from June 7th. – 12th.
Participants:
Mr. Leendert Struijs, President
Mr. Wilko Brink, Financial Controller

Background of this trip

The amount of money budgeted to be spent on polio patients is diminished because of the following aspects:
- high costs of Visa’s
- increased cost of import – and handling cost of goods
Our management requested meetings to discuss reduction of these costs.

Visit to Willem Struijs Centre on June 8th. 2004
Mr. Matéka is still the manager. The 12 employees could not be very productive, because of a lack of materials.

Result:
The Management of OGV will discuss, how we can provide them with materials on a regular basis in order to guarantee continuity.

Visit to Mongali Brazzaville on June 8th. 2004
We met Mr. André Kabi, a very friendly man. We will report about him later in this report.
The workshop of the Centre is very clean and organised. The scrub bands, which were delivered 6 weeks before (magnificent machines labelled Otto Bock and Schein!) are still not in use due to a lack of leather and rubber material and a lack of electricity. Congo Brazzaville depends on electricity imported from the Democratic Republic of Congo, previously the Belgian Congo, which is plagued by unrest right now.
In this workshop, school furniture is manufactured and handicapped people bind books.

Visit to Bacongo on June 8th. 2004
Same situation: it’s very quiet because of a lack of materials. Our contact person was out of the office.

Visit to the Minister of Social Affairs, Solidarity, Human Aid, War Victims and Family, Mrs Emilienne Raoul and her Secretary-General, Mr. Jean Clotaire Tombi on June 9th. 2004
Mrs. Raoul was very friendly and showed a high level of interest in what our Foundation has achieved during the past few years. We discussed with her ways she could help us to lower import duties and costs as well as the high costs of the visa’s.
Result:
Mrs Raoul decided to drastically reduce the costs for our activities, provided, that we would meet some administrative-organisational conditions.

Meeting Mr. Andre Kabi – (Kabi school) on June 9th. 2004.
Mr.Kabi invited us to join him and his wife to visit a small school with 87 (!) physically and mentally handicapped children. Three of them are deaf and dumb, one is blind and one suffers from HIV and is not able to walk or to stand-up by himself.
No one cares about these children; they are worth nothing in this society, not now, not ever!
Mr. Kabi is the only person who looks after them and with the help of three (also handicapped) teachers tries to teach them basic knowledge.
When these children reach the age of 16 or 17 years, they will be transferred to a Social Workshop like Mongali. The boys are educated to become furniture makers, bookbinders or cycle repairers.
The girls mostly find shelter at Sister Ancilla and other nuns where they are taught to make their own cloths.

Tricycle Project
Another special project is the Tricycle project: boys of the Social Workshop assemble tricycles from parts of old bikes. We were provided with a drawing indicating where exactly the bikes should be cut so that more bikes fit in a shipping container.

Result:
We will evaluate if we will be able to adopt the school totally, especially because those children can later on be employed in our new workshop. This would have to be done outside the perimeters of our foundation.

We will look into how the regulations of our foundation can be changed to make the tricycle project successful.

Meeting with Mr. Gasto Kapo in Brazzaville, June 10th. 2004
Our foundation is planning to build a workshop in the extension of the Willem Struijs Centre, in which tricycles will be assembled. Mr. Kapo is an employee of our architect. Technical drawings have been checked and we were successful in reducing the cost of the extension by 10-15%.

The final decision when to start, will be made as soon as we have collected sufficient money.

Meeting with Sister Ancilla in Brazzaville on June 10th. 2004
Sister Ancilla is a Dutch nun, who for over ten years has deeply cared about the Congolese people. She is involved in the education of young girls from the Kabi School, teaching them to make their own clothing.
Sister Ancilla is very much involved in our polio projects and she was rather disappointed that vaccination projects do not show sufficient positive results. Her excellent relations with the Arch Bishop are of major importance to our Foundation.
If our Foundation can indeed realise its future plans to do even small operations on polio patients, we will need the help of the nuns, to provide for the after-care of the patients.

Meeting with Sister Hélène at Brazzaville on June 11th. 2004
Sister Hélène, who used to live in Owando in the northern part of the country, was a day in Brazzaville for personal business. She handed over a letter for the Management of our Foundation containing a list of materials and machinery, urgently needed in Owando, as gangs recently destroyed this workshop.
From the pictures she showed us, we could see, that considerable improvements have been made with the €. 2000,00 she received from us.
In order to fully restore the workshop, she needed an additional €. 7.000,00.

Result:
In the next meeting, a decision needs to be made whether or not to send her that amount, after she has sent us a detailed calculation.

Visit to Caritas and the Archbishop at Brazzaville on June 11th. 2004
With an open mind we exchanged thoughts with Mr. Mpassi, president of Caritas Congo, regarding the payment of rent for the buildings in which the workshops are situated.
We mutually decided to stop payment of rent immediately.
This subject was also raised during a meeting with Mr. Paul Richard and with the Archbishop. The Archbishop was fairly new and was not familiar with the delegation of our Foundation. He was brought up to speed about the various subjects by the assistant of Mr. Mpassie. He was very positive about our initiatives over the years.

He seems to be very interested in the extension project and our activities with the tricycle project, but seems to have been informed about the possibility of doing small operations there as well in the future.
He offered us help and co-operation for the organisation of the after-care, which could be given by Sister Ancilla and her colleagues.

In Summary:
1. Promises from the Minister mean quite a cost reduction for our foundation.
2.We can start preparations for the extension of the Willem Struijs Centre for the benefit of the tricycle project.
3.Plans are made to adopt the Kabi School.
4.Polio centre at Owando can be restored
Workshop in Owando can be restored.[/i]
5.Rent Payments, for the use of the buildings, are stopped.
Discussions have been started to allow nurses to do after care activities in the future.

Bleiswijk, September 6th. 2004.