Bill Gates announced today that he is stepping out of his day to day role with Microsoft 2 years from today in order to work full-time with his charitable foundation, which now holds $29 Billion in assets and is focussed on revolutionizing health and education in developing countries around the world.

Bono has been making miracles happen in developing countries for the last several years with his One campaign.  http://one.org

Through the conversations I’ve been having the past several days with Kenyans, seeing what they are doing here, reading this morning reading how their finance minister has eliminated taxes on flour, sugar and cancelled 129 business license requirements, and seeing what Vision Force can do here to make a difference…

I see what are now 3rd world countries becoming a dynamic force of free enterprise, progress and technology.  I see a new era of progress in which values of community, family and culture are not lost in the tsunami of progress.  I see new models for entrepreneurial communities.  I see the youth recreating the world they live in, governed not by tradition but by vision.

Things are so exciting here.  Kenyans are thirsty for ideas that give them the power to transform and uplift the world around them.  The youth here face hard time, very hard times, as do their parents.  They don’t have much of anything handed to them.  I get the sense that the opportunity here is comparable to that which existed a few hundred years ago in America, as the idea of individual rights and freedom spawned vision in the individual and anything truly seemed possible.

While Africa is still suffering the strangling grip of poverty, tribal warfare and disease, I sense the earth trembling here–not from the kind of quake that is going to swallow up life and end in death, but the kind of murmur before the unveiling of a futuristic creation never seen before.  Can you feel it too?

Please post your comments.  And for the photos, see the blog entry below.

Ok, here are the photos from the first few days of our adventure: http://visionforce.com/kenya/photojournal.htm

I haven’t blogged in a few days, and in that time SO much has happened!

Several of the youth here are hip hop artists with a vision for rising the consciousness of Kenyans and rallying the youth via music. They’ve performed for us and we captured it on video. We’ll share those soon!

Also, at the cyber cafe the other evening, I met a man who is filming a documentary of Kenyan street kids and the programs that are being implemented to help these kids. Then, the following day I met a man who takes youth whose parents cannot afford secondary school (high school) and has set up a small school to teach them everything about computers for free if they can’t afford tuition. Then, last night in the workshop we created a vision and a project with our youth for building an internet-connected computer center on the campus of this school where they still cut the grass by hand with a sickle and don’t have electricity or painted walls in the classrooms.

The new catch phrase on campus among the cool guys is, “What if!” Wow, so much to share, so little time. I am used to having internet and cell phone access 24 hours a day, but here it’s only a few minutes at a time.

More later! -Michael

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