DSM Zambia: A tear from Africa

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

A tear from Africa

Last two days we interviewed many people who are working in the most critical communities of Zambia. Now we have a close picture of the local situation of the most vulnerable children and their community. It is even worse than you can imagine. Children come to school to fill their cup and this will be their only meal for a day. Parents died by aids, Grandparents or brothers or sisters will take care over them.

It’s hardly to believe but this is the situation what we observed. Parents cried out for help in their fight against hunger. Programmes need to be developed to help communities in their fight against hunger. Essential food and education for the children is the starting point.
Who will feed the hungry children? Who will teach them? Who will take care in their vulnerability? This is a cry for help! We ended up wednesday moring with an invitation made by the children the to dance with them on the rithem of the bongo's .

Joy and music... this ist the strenght of Africa

School visit and impressions
Hereby the link where you can find more pictures from our visit to the community schools
Pictures made by Adri Geeve and Carolien van Heerebeek.

http://picasaweb.google.com/dsm.zambia

1 comment:

Margot said...: Hi team members,

thanks for sharing your impressive stories and photo's with us, unbelievable! I am glad we can help to make the difference for the people in Zambia. It makes me even look more forward to my own visit to Zambia, planned for October.

Alfi and I are at the moment working out our fund raising activities. We get wonderful help of other people! Tomorrow we meet again.

We keep each other informed offcourse.

Love and good luck, Margot; June 19, 2008 at 9:07 AM

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Carolien van Heerebeek

Hi, my name is Carolien van Heerebeek, 25 years old and I work at DSM Sourcing at Sittard, the Netherlands for the department (Bio) Chemicals.

My personal motivation to join this project is that during my stay in India I have seen many poor people, but as girl on my own there I was not able to help them. This project does give me the opportunity to help people that we born in a less developed part of the world in a sustainable way. Especially young children, but also their parents will benefit from the information on healthier food usage and with this a better future for the whole society in the long term can be build.

Furthermore my department shows a lot of interest in sustainability since the economical footprint of DSM is for a large part determined by the raw materials that are purchased. DSM Purchasing has also adopted one of the schools included in the School Feeding Program, the Community School at Lusaka. I am very eager to visit this school and find out what we can do to support them even more!

Vikram Sharma

I lead the site Human Resource (HR) function for the manufacturing facility of DSM Anti-Infectives India since 2005. Besides the core functional aspects of HR, I have keen interest in Social Responsibility/ Sustainability and have been actively involved in various initiatives at the local level (for instance fundraising for victims of natural disasters, organizing run for AIDS awareness, village development schemes around the DAI manufacturing site, blood donation camps etc.); Torch; Water 4 Life (www.water4life.eu) etc. I enjoy participating in the Employee Engagement interventions of DSM-WFP partnership and the Global Children Arts Competition in Jan 2008 was a great success, in India.

I stay in Chandigarh which is a modern, well planned city located at the foothills of Shivalik range of mountains in Northern part of India and was designed by the famous French architect, Le Corbusier.

My wife works for a school which provides free education and food to almost 900 students who come for economically weaker section of society. My daughter studies in grade II and younger son in Kindergarden. I love watching soccer and indulge in gardening as well as socialising. Reading Business subjects keeps me engaged on weekends besides spending quality time with family.

I have done my Masters in Business Administration and specialized in Human Resources from Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, India.

I consider myself really fortunate for having got an opportunity to represent DAI as well as India in the DSM-WFP assignment in Zambia (June 2008 team)

Marianne Kuppens

I am Marianne Kuppens and work since January as a chemical engineer for DSM in Geleen (DMC – DME).

Who/what: I studied chemical engineering in Eindhoven and after graduating I studied a year at the College des Ingenieurs in Paris (MBA). After working for ExxonMobil in Meerhout (B) and in Rotterdam, I started this year in Geleen for DSM - moving back to the south of the Netherlands.

Why did I apply for this assignment:

It’s a great opportunity to be able to go to Africa – an impressive continent with its own culture – and try to make a difference, do something!! We will have the chance to get to know the people of Zambia in a different way than when ‘just visiting’ as tourists. We will be working together on a very important task: improve the (knowledge of) nutrition and health, focussing on 4th graders (who can then in their way spread their knowledge to all the community). It is a challenge, especially since we will only be working with the Zambian people for 2 weeks, but we are with a group of 4 enthusiastic people and the next groups in October will built further on the ground work we have done..

Adri Geeve

I work as R&D Chemist at the Analytical Department of DSM Resins in Zwolle (Netherlands). The Analytical team is a shared service for research, marketing and customers' service for performance materials world wide. It's really challenging to accelerate innovation with our knowledge base. DSM Resins in Zwolle is a beautiful site with a wide variety of business groups such as Neo Resins, Powder Coating Resins, Composite Resins and New Business Development. More information look at our website http://www.dsm.com/en_US/html/dcr/legal.htm

For the last 6 years I was also involved in the work counsel. Sustainable Entrepreneurship is a very important statement for our company. It gives a focus on people, planet and profit.My motivation to participate in the Zambia project together with the World Food Programme is my belief that we as individuals and as a company can make the difference.

Once I visited the mountain people in Peru and friends came up with arguments as: 'Why should you help them….they have their own values and we have ours'.My answer was that 'hunger' is not a value…. it's our enemy! It is the number one killer on our planet!Passion for people is my motivation to make the difference in the fight against hunger.Let's fight together with the weapons of innovation, knowledge, money and love.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

A tear from Africa

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