cybertree

And before you know it, it’s time to pack the boxes and leave…

I am moving back to Germany next month. I managed to squeeze in 3 weeks in Moshi (Yeah!) with Foot2Afrika , before I start my new job. Preparations for both events keep me very busy, never mind wrapping up my research in Dublin, finalizing all kinds of things and saying good bye to all my friends in Dublin. Gonna miss you guys - don’t be strangers, Germany is just a short trip away

This time a German friend from college is coming as well, so IT training is the flavor of the month.. Over a glass of (good!) wine the idea came up in spring and now, just a few months later we are getting ready for the trip.

We have done some fundraising: both of us online at betterplace and me offline with a coffee morning at DCU and with my sponsoring card “harrassing” pretty much everybody I talked to the last 4 weeks.. So far we have raised about € 1300; another €80 and we have reached our goal.

We also asked for a list of things Foot2Afrika send us. Friends gave us some of the items and we got some donations or vouchers from stores. Thanks to all of you!

Now I am pretty much done with the preparation. Started with the Lariam, so all set..

Now I just need to get my boxes picked up by a moving company. Sounds trivial, but indeed it took 2 weeks to get an offer from 3 companies. Now there are four days left before I am leaving the country and I still haven’t had the chance to arrange a time with the company with the lowest offer. But that’s just a little problem I will probably laugh about in max 1 weeks time

Next week at this time I will be back in Moshi - looking forward to the Foot2Afrika crowd, familiar and new faces.

Thanks to the people who put in the work to provide us with the selection of home-made cakes; here is what you missed if you didn’t make it:

Polish Chocolate cake from Joana - BIG succes again
Lemon Cheesecake from Jie
Banoffi Pie from Evans
Linzer Torte
Marble cake
Chocolate brownies from Tony
Apple crumble cake
Paula’s special cake
Romanian Space cakes - just kidding.. , Ramona brought a variety of fruit cake, delicious as always
Home-made cookies from Jenny
Lemon Cake from Trudy

Thanks to the staff of the chaplaincy for helping with setup and providing the space.
And finally thanks to all who attended the coffee morning.

We raised a fantastic 365 € - a big chunk of the funds we are trying to raise and which I will take with me to Tanzania.

If you couldn’t make it on Wednesday morning, but would like to support the fundraising and online isn’t your thing, there are also these 2 options:

I am still collecting funds with a sponsoring card - just talk to me when you see me on campus - I usually have the sponsoring card with me at all times

AND

Piggy, a money-hungry piglet (aka money bank), has moved in with
Breda McManus, EEng, Room 348, DCU
until Wednesday 19 June.
Piggy prefers paper money, but will eat coins of all sizes as well:)

I have been canvassing among the engineers at DCU for a couple of days and so far we have come up with a fantastic 370€! There is still plenty of room on my fundraising card - feel free to talk to me at any time
Thanks a lot to all supporters: Tarik, Jogile, Tian, Yann, Conor (both ;)), Owen, Evans, Tamas, Joe & Susan from the Inter Faith Center, Sarah (from NDRC), Philip, Gabriel (both ;)), Noel, Paddy and Stephen.
The amount has been added to the total and we have come a lot closer to our target.

Next week’s Tanzania Coffee Morning (5 June, 10am to 1pm, Inter Faith Center, DCU) with a long list of extremely yummy home-made cakes is coming up. So hopefully many will enjoy the cake and feed Piggy (the glorified pink shoebox aka Piggy Bank).

Also, if you live in Dublin, you are on Facebook and you are in need of some kitchen utensils, have a look at Piggy’s Kitchen Sale
Have a good week and spread the word about our fundraising.
Feel free to share the link  to our online fundraising page

Sabine

I am organizing a table quiz and proceeds go to Foot2Africa .

Teams of up to 4.
10€ per Person, 6€ for students.
Sign up on the evening; come as a team or join a team.

I went to Tanzania last year - not traveling this year myself, but one of my colleagues from Engineering will go together with his wife and deliver money, cameras and other much needed items.

We will have a
1) table quiz
2) raffle 

The (growing) list of prizes you can see below

You can
1) bring your friends
2) drop off used digital cameras with rechargeable batteries for the Msamaria Photo project
3) buy Rudisha products (bags, aprons, jewellery)
4) buy Tanzania postcards with pictures from the Msamaria photo project and more.

Update (16 July)

Some fantatsic new team prizes for the Table Quiz on Wednesday:
team voucher for 4 gâteau at Le Petit Cafe, the French coffee shop with home-made cake at the corner of Ballymun Road and St Pappins Road!
All you have to do is come and win the table quiz

Prizes for the Table Quiz & the Raffle: 

Some of the team prizes
2 Swahili classes for a team from www.swahili.ie
Home-made Cake
NuBar Team Voucher

Wine & more
Extra dry Prosecco
Organic Elderflower Cordial
Dry White Wine
Becherovka

Food & stuff
Italian Pudding & Ice Dishes
Sardinian Torrone
Gourmet Jelly Beans
Rosey Tea pot & tea cup

All kinds of things
2 Salsa Classes with Christiano Colucci
Spring toy for your desk
Souvenir from South Africa

Books
Ian Rankin, Exit Music
The Culchie’s Guide to Dublin & a Dublin Street Atlas
Robert Kee, Ireland’s History

Tomorrow I’ll attend the dot conf  at the National College of Ireland, in the middle of Dublin’s IFSC. It happens to be the college where I did my MSc by Research - it’s always nice to go back and say hello to everybody .

The first remarkable thing definitely is their promotional video. I love it! It’s definitely worth seeing.

Then their line up of speakers sounds very promising; I’ll comment on some of the talks I attend.

I really like their approach to get people involved with the so-called Deep Dives (I signed up for two of them) and a raffle for those people signing up to a Linkedin group.

Communication among attendees before the event is encouraged with more activities in the Linkedin group,  I can’t remember what you can win, but I thought the timing was excellent.

I’m curious to see if this takes some of the speechlessness out of the coffee breaks - unless you know everybody, it can be a bit awkward. I’m sure you know what I mean…

I’m really looking forward to it - see you there?

It is this time of year again, it seems. The NDLR invited again for a symposium and many, many came together at Trinity. I missed most of the morning, travelling from DCU into town (it is amazing how long it can take…). The afternoon program was a series of short presentations. Usually these power point massacresget to me, but due to the short time every speaker had, it was actually bearable.

Connor Galvin from UCD together with one of his Master students, primary school teacher Anne McMorrough, presented their experiences with building a learning community as partof the master’s program. They pointed the audience to a few web pages:

FIS - Film for Schools

NING - yet another social networking site

eTwinning - a website to build school partnerships in Europe

teachnet.ie - a portal to provide online ressources for primary and post-primary teachers

ed.gov/free - free ressources from the US Department of Education

Caron McMahon from DCU’s Learning Innovation Unit and Freda Neill from Trinity made the benefit of their educational videos and the e-learning units very clear. Very entertaining way to present this topic - a good example that learning can be fun.

More to come, gotta go….

One of our colleagues from the college left and we all went for a pint (well, it was more like 4-n pints…) From there we went to find food, but ended up walking along the Liffey, Jeanie Johnston and finally went home. There are strange things happening in the city - the weekend before Kate killed Colin! At her birthday. Well, he was the birthday cake. Oh, speaking of animated animals - what do you think about the penguin?

… this is what I see most of the days:

Walking towards the IFSC along the Liffey.

View from my window in the middle of the IFSC with the NCIris in the front (still don’t understand, why we have a flower in a high-security-cage in front of our college…).

For all my friends who wonder or forgot what writing-up means. I am hiding in this box I created, hoping to finish my thesis soon….

A very brief summary of what I’m writing about is this.