These were the sobering words of John Dada and summed up this week’s UK-Nigeria online meeting:

“This month we must focus on stocking up grains, be ready to respond to alerts on elderly and children who may be at risk of abuse”

The words followed on from last week’s discussion when we learned of Fantsuam Foundation’s rescue of an elderly mama who had been beaten and accused of witchcraft by her family and of the Rumbu (food bank) programme.
John explained that:
“The famine is most likely to hit Kafanchan and Kaduna state as a whole since many could not access their farm lands located in vulnerable areas ( post election turmoil) which means less farming activities for the year."

My weekly involvement with the news from Fantsuam Foundation as documented by these blogs should have prepared me for the unexpected but again it was shocking to hear of yet another accusation of witchcraft.
John Dada explained that it was the new team members Emmanuel and Ayuba who since the last meeting had been at the centre of a rescue of an elderly mama who was accused of witchcraft.
The FF team held a meeting with the entire family on Tuesday(17th), and their nurse had been to provide drugs and further treatment for the mama.
As Emmanuel stated : “These are some of the challenges we face in the rural areas where people tend to take the law into their hands”

This week brought the usual UK-Nigeria meeting at which a number of issues were discussed. But at this juncture I would like to take a moment to highlight another part of the two groups’ work together - namely how our network can be utilised for good.

On January 9th, Dadamac in the UK received a message from http://www.peoples-uni.org/ " target="_self">Peoples-uni (Australia), an organisation which is building public health capacity using internet based e-learning. In this message, staff there informed us that they had received a message from one of their Nigerian students, who was clearly distressed. This student had informed them that he was in the process of being evacuated to safe ground after enduring a set of very unpleasant experiences, which saw him trapped amid Nigeria’s ongoing unrest.

Following a short Christmas break, Wednesday the 4th of January saw the restart of the weekly UK-Nigeria team Meetings.

A TV programme in 2011 was a turning point for me. The programme followed a familiar format. There were four participants, all facing similar difficult situations. They were shown struggling on their own; a guru offered advice; they acted on it. When the credits rolled a voiceover updated us on their situations a few months later. This is an account of what happened as I watched the programme, and what I did as a result. First I'll describe the programme itself and how I responded to it. Later I'll write about the action I took, progress so far, and what may happen next. The name of the programme could influence your response to what follows, so I won't name it yet.

We were introduced to four main characters. My heart went out to them. I have struggled with similar situations at various points in my life. I could tell you those stories, but the details are not important here. What matters is that you know I am qualified to comment on this subject, and could give you ample evidence should you so wish. If you are facing redundancy, or have been struggling for some time to reposition yourself in the world of work, or you are supporting someone you love in that situation, or you are seeing relationships crumble under the relentless onslaught of failure to find work, then be assured that we could talk easily and truthfully together from areas of deep shared experience.

I tend to ask questions. When my Dad read us bed-time stories one of my favourites was about the Elephant's Child - who:

"asked questions about everything that he saw, or heard, or felt, or smelt, or touched, and all his uncles and his aunts spanked him. And still he was full of 'satiable curtiosity!" `

Like the Elephants Child I pestered my many uncles and aunts with endless questions. As an adult the Open Univeristy increased my confidence and ability to "ask questions" and find things out. In particular the systems course that I did helped me to see the value of getting the right questions.

Soon after I got involved in the things that became Dadamac one of my friends was questioning why I put so much of my own resources into what I was doing. Like me, he had been an OU student. - and that helped him to understand my explanation.  I explained that, in a way, what I was doing was similar to what I might had done if I'd done a higher degree (not a taught one. but a research one). I had got inolved in things that enabled me to explore various questions on a deep level, and I was hooked on the intellectual challenge - naturally I was putting my time and money into it - as I would have done if I was a "normal, traditional student'

Dadamac as a learning journey

Dadamac reflects my ongoing learning journey - and it is full of wheels within wheels.. I'm  a learner learning about learning, and doing so by teaching and learning, and using the Internet for much of that learning, and learning about learning (and teaching) by using the Internet... doing things in practice, reflecting on them, reading what others have written, discussing.. asking myself questions and exploring the answers. Of course I don't have any accreditation for my knowledge, but I do have a considerable digital footprint. 

My December diary - heading towards the Christmas break and the close of the year. It's a varied collection of diary dates - and I hope during 2012 it may become more obvious how all these things are connected with each other.

Hi David

Time to move on. We've been playing with the idea of exploring the future together through open letters, for three months.

I haven't yet written a reply to the last open letter you posted but our paths have crossed several times since you wrote it. So this post is to tidy up our open letter experiment and bring in some conclusions from our recent meetings and conversations elsewhere.

Setting the scene

Let me set the scene for this post - probably the final post of the first stage of our journey into the future together. This was a three month experiment, which is now drawing to a close. We may choose to restart - and that would be a second experiment, growing out of the first. Or we may draw it to a complete close. Either way is fine.

I'm writing from memory (because I'll get drawn into a different level of detail if I go back and read what we wrote). If we do need to check for mismatches between my recollections and what we actually wrote we can check the archives later.

Archiving our lives

The possibility of checking the archives of our posts - and not normally allowing ourselves any exchange of ideas outside of that space - gives us access to a level of accurate recall usually denied us in other areas of life. The possibility (indeed the reality) of accurate recall is changing as we begin to find our way in this strange reality that is "the way we live our lives now".

Now - and our perceptions of it

What do I mean by "now"? I guess I mean the succession of days that I live in - days like today, December 19th 2011.

If I start to analyse today it is packed with things that used to belong "in the future". Such things arrive repeatedly - and with increasing rapidity. The future becomes the present on a daily basis. This quickly makes the recent past seem historic.

The last UK-Nigeria weekly meeting of 2011 unearthed a sad situation which is unfortunately faced all too often by those attempting to provide aid in developing countries.

Once again it involves an instance where such aid fails to reach those in dire need. The major frustration is that Fantsuam Foundation possesses the necessary skills and expertise to deliver this help, yet - despite its 10-year history of bringing innovative integrated programmes to its impoverished rural host community - “top down” funding remains hard to come by.

John Dada of Fantsuam explained the situation to Pam and myself. He said: “We feel sorry that we constantly have to inform folks that we do not have the level of slack in our budget for meeting unplanned expenses.

“A young man came in this morning, his home was burnt in the crisis and now he needs to have a surgery on Friday at the Teaching Hospital. He wanted help from Fantsuam Foundation.
He is one of many we have to turn away. There is a lot of talk from the Government end on peacebuilding, but it seems largely for photo opportunities and the assistance is not reaching the folks who really need it.”

A glitch with Skype meant that the Nigerian posts from this week’s UK-Nigeria team meeting were significantly delayed. However, as this is now an increasingly rare occurrence it gave us an opportunity to test previously relied upon communication channels. So, with a mixture of Skpe typed messages, sms, emails and Yahoo, here is this week’s update.

• John reported that Comfort is in Abuja for a meeting with the World Bank pertaining to the rice business development service project which they had previously supported in June.
• Fantsuam Foundation is expect to host a team from the Minnesota Renewable Energy from January 15th 2012 for training and solar installation at for the paediatric ward of Kafanchan Hospital.
• John and Pam had both made contact with Fola at Dadamac’s outpost in Ago-Are.
  The photo above, from Fola, shows the Life Fountain School, Nigeria where Fola reports he will be teaching pupils computer and internet usage next term.
• Fola has been able to add more photos to the Dadamac’s community Flickr