the peace that passed

We officially had to cancel our upcoming Peace and Cultural Festival earlier this week. Unfortunately, despite our fundraising assault on the ground here and the tireless efforts of the UK team we were not able to gain the sponsorships necessary to make it happen. To be quite honest, we obtained zero dollars in sponsorship here in Liberia which is something that perplexes me considering the amount of time we spent pursuing potentials coupled with our relentless follow-up. The cancellation stirs mixed emotions for me personally. On one hand, this is the event that I’ve been devoting my energies to since my arrival, so it was hard to swallow at first when I thought about all the time and effort that was for nought. The cancellation also made me sad because it proved me right. When I first learned about the plans and immense scale of the Festival I was baffled by the notion that our little AYDAP was going to be able to pull it off. We’re all very capable humans but the Festival was quite dreamy in its mass and I feared it was beyond our capacity organizationally. I have been working diligently toward the production of the Festival utilizing quite a bit of ‘blind faith’ and hoping that what couldn’t be done in the US (given the time constraints, staffing and required budget) could indeed be accomplished in West Africa.

At the same point, it’s a bit exciting to just start new at this point after all I’ve learned during my initial time here, as if the Festival development was just a dress-rehearsal! We’re currently attempting some ‘organizational restructuring’ to improve the effectiveness of AYDAP and increase our capacity and functionality. Once that’s complete I’ll be happy to share more details regarding our next projects. It’s an interesting situation that I’m in here, our team is very capable, driven, passionate and offers great creativity when it comes to new project ideas and ways to impact our community; we just don’t have the funds available to actually implement any of the projects we are ready to develop! Hopefully that will turn around soon as we’re currently pursuing some partnerships that would enable us to implement projects that will make a big difference.