Polonia Global Fund

President Moi will today inspect development projects in Bureti District and thereafter address a public rally at Sotik town grounds.

The President, escorted by the Rift Valley Provincial Commissioner (PC), Peter Raburu, will arrive at Sotik town grounds at 12 noon where he will be received by Bureti District leaders.

Meanwhile, the President yesterday at State House, Nairobi, bade farewell to the outgoing ambassadors of Belgium and Poland, Mr. Leo Willems and Mr. Anderzej Olaszowka respectively.

The Belgium ambassador is leaving the country after a four-year tour of duty. Addressing him, President Moi noted that relations between Kenya and Belgium were cordial.

Noting that Belgium was a member of the European Union (EU), President Moi urged the EU to be more understanding of the African cause more so Kenyan.

He said the EU should take Kenya seriously especially when the country is articulating her social-economic position in the international fora.

Saying Africa needed to develop strong institutions, President Moi added that even the newly-launched African Union should not just be symbolic but should aim at solving a myriad of problems on the continent including civil strife and conflicts.

On bi-lateral matters, President Moi noted with appreciation Belgium’s involvement in Kenya’s development particularly in the rural areas.

And bidding the Polish ambassador farewell, President Moi noted that during the envoy’s five-year tour of duty, the number of Polish tourist to Kenya had doubled.

President Moi further noted with satisfaction that there were several Kenyan students studying in Polish universities particularly in the field of engineering.

Saying that relations between the two countries were cordial, the President however added there was need to put more effort to enhance bi-lateral co-operation between the two states.

Also present were Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation, Rebecca Nabutola, and the Chief of Protocol, George Owuor.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany’s most prominent literary critic, was awarded the Goethe Prize this week for his contributions to postwar German literature.

The prize, given every few years on Aug. 28, the poet’s birthday, was previously bestowed on German-speaking intellectual icons like Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud. For Mr. Reich-Ranicki, 82, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor, the award is “the highest distinction I could have received.”

Mr. Reich-Ranicki, who is commonly referred to as the pope of German literature, has recounted his own extraordinary story in his best-selling autobiography, “My Life.” He was born to a mother who loved Germany and who packed him off to relatives and a school in Berlin when he was 9. He often says that in his youth he was so absorbed by the German canon that when he was deported to Poland nine years after his arrival, he took his “invisible luggage” of Goethe, Schiller and Mann with him.

A Jew, he and his wife survived the Warsaw ghetto and the Holocaust with the help of an unemployed Polish typesetter (whom he calls only Bolek) who concealed him until the end of the war with just one book, the Bible, in reach.

Bolek, he recounted in his autobiography, used to say after a few vodkas: “Adolf Hitler, Europe’s most powerful man, decided that these two humans should die. And I, a little typesetter from Warsaw, have decided they should live. Now we will see who is victorious.”

Soon after the war Mr. Reich-Ranicki, staying in Poland, became a diplomat. He was posted to London as the Polish consul general in 1948-49, where he also secretly acted as a spy. When his spying came to light in the early 1990’s, he justified it by saying he did it out of gratitude to the nation that kept him alive until the end of the war.

Mr. Reich-Ranicki has had to confront the problem that the country and culture he is attracted to destroyed his family. This may help explain why a consistent theme in his works has been “the failure of the Age of Reason” to guarantee tolerance in German society.

This attraction ultimately pulled him to defect from Poland to West Germany in 1958. Almost immediately he was drawn into the “Gruppe 47,” the literary circle of Walter Jens and Heinrich Böll, who sought to nourish a cultural transformation toward democracy in Germany.

He started as a literary critic at the German weekly Die Zeit in 1960 and has since been a ubiquitous voice in the literary establishment. Since the late 80’s, his influence has been augmented by his television programs, where he has become famous for taking on the great and the small in German literature in his recognizable Polish-accented German.

In 1995 he provoked the giant of German literature, Günter Grass, by scathingly dismissing his book “A Wide Field” as “idiotic.” He was then featured in a German magazine tearing up a picture of Mr. Grass. Recently, he admitted that Mr. Grass’s latest novel, “Crab Walking,” brought him to tears.

The jury in Frankfurt said it was honoring “one of the most important literature critics in the German-speaking world,” who “through his decades-long work, in his singular way, made literature popular and won new circles of readers.”

Not present in the crowd at Wednesday’s ceremony was the novelist Martin Walser, who this summer delivered a thinly disguised parody of Mr. Reich-Ranicki in which the protagonist, a critic and Jewish Holocaust survivor, is murdered.

The literary editor for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has accused Mr. Walser of producing a thinly veiled anti-Semitic work.

The idea of a platform… That was it. It answered our needs and would open the door for others faced with the same challenge – using their resources to do good in ways only they could imagine or design.

We adopted the word Polonia as part of our name. The word is derived from the Polish language root word ‘pole’ meaning a field or platform. As our chairperson has said, we do not want to be the tallest tree in the field or the biggest building – we would much rather be the platform on which good works are based.

Our platform idea allows those who want to direct their funding into a particular outcome to design a program that meets their requirements. We provide the support to bring their vision to reality.

We designed nine specific platforms for a start. They include platforms for children, families, seniors, education, learning, dialog, sports, the arts, and our soon to be announced tenth platform in wellness.

In my next installment, Think globally act locally – the cliche must end.

In the past few days I’ve had a few people asking me about the origin of PGF. Not the where and when, but the why. Over the next few posts I’ll attempt to explain a little.

About 8 years ago some friends and I were invited to a meeting. A city school district was going to do away with foreign language programs. At the same time the district was closing out its desegregation program. We were asked to represent the community, speak to the school board and come up with a plan. We saved the language programs right away. We also worked on a comprehensive plan to turn district schools into world schools. Several K-8 schools would be converted into magnet schools. Each would represent a study in a particular culture. The schools would feed into a U.N. High School. District students would be prepared for achievement on a global scale.

Unfortunately the larger plan never went beyond the Board and administration of the district. I’m sure you can imagine well integrated city schools turning out positive, dynamic and educated young people with a global vision. Unfortunately others could not.

For my colleagues and I, this was not our first or last community service mission. We involved ourselves regularly in civic projects and charitable ventures. What we did learn was that people with dynamic ideas of their own do not fit well into organizations that already have specific missions and values. You can work to the best of your ability and donate funds to keep it going, but you cannot reinvent (nor would I want to reinvent) that charity.

For me, the years spent in not-for-profit financial management, the years serving on Boards of Directors, the years of learning were my street education.

Well after a few too many nights of getting together with my fiends, philosophizing, reasoning and talking into the wee hours, an idea formed. The idea of a platform?

Welcome to the PGF blog. I’ll be using this blog to talk about the work of PGF, world events that may be of interest to you, and some of the day-to-day stuff my colleagues and I encounter in running a non-profit agency.

For those of you unfamiliar with PGF, it is an organization that’s a little over two years old now. Our vision and mission are concerned with our world, the place and value of culture and societies in the new global vision and how we can effectively work together to build bridges of understanding, respect and cooperation.

I’m happy that you will have a chance to share the experience with me.

In the next few installment’s I will be discussing the origin of PGF and the work we facilitate.