Will’s posterous

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Vision of Hope Appeal.pdf (180 KB)

As well as doing my day job at ZARAN I've been on the look out for some other smaller projects to support while I'm here in Zambia. I've been incredibly fortunate to meet with the guys who run Vision of Hope, a small Zambian charity that works with girls who live and work on the streets of the capital Lusaka. They're just starting out but having visited the project it is already clear what a huge difference Vision of Hope are making to the lives of the girls they support.

Poverty and HIV are the major driving forces behind girls as young as 12 ending up on the street. Once there they will often turn to sex work to make money and be exposed to violence and sexual abuse. Most of the girls Vision of Hope is working with are addicted to glue. Some of them already have children of their own.

The weekly drop-in centre run by the very wonderful Chitalu and Meg gives the girls a safe place to bathe, wash their clothes, get checked out by a nurse, eat a couple of square meals and most importantly spend time socialising in a safe, secure environment. In the afternoons a trained youth worker runs sessions on hygiene, sexually transmitted diseases and other vital life skills.

I've offered up some of my time to help them with logo design, web design and communications more generally and it's been a hugely rewarding experience. I'll post again once the website's live but in the meantime have a look at our appeal (attached as a pdf to this post) or just jump right in and donate.

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There's a million-and-one online quizzes out there and they're a firm favourite of those looking to add a bit of 'interaction' to their site. But usually they don't get thought through very well and end up being a bit one-size-fits-none. Answering a few simple questions beforehand should avoid this: Why should people do the quiz? What will they actually learn? What if they know quite a lot already? What happens when they finish?

International AIDS charity Avert (www.avert.org) have obviously answered just these questions. They have quizzes for people of varying levels of knowledge in various topics and some of the questions do actually make you think (embarrasingly I got a question about HIV in Zambia wrong...). But the best part is the follow up. For every question you got wrong Avert provides a link to the relevant article on their site where you would have found the answer. Really simple (and on the face of it obvious) but it so rarely happens. It's a shame there's only one set of questions for each level but it's good nonetheless. Check 'em out here: http://www.avert.org/hivquiz.htm

You can also create your own quiz or get print ready versions that can be used offline (in a classroom perhaps). Nice.

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