You could be doing so much more with your life (Why Sudu?)

As bad as that sounds, I’ve heard that statement in so many ways since I decided to move back home to launch my organization Sudu. This has been a dream of mine since I left Sierra Leone at a young age. It wasn’t in this form back then, but the thought was there. I’ve also been building it for years and the name came to me when I thought about what type of environment I wanted to create for the many vulnerable orphans around the world, especially in West Africa.

About 5 years ago, I made a Facebook post asking my friends how to say “home,” “house” etc in Fulah. So, Sudu or Ka Sudu means home or at home depending on the context in Fulah, my native language. I am half Limba and Fulah, from a wonderful village called Kamakwie in Sierra Leone. I wanted to choose something unique that truly conveyed the idea. I won’t go into all the details now, but let’s just say that after receiving our official stamp of approval, which to me was the 501c3 non-profit status, it was about time for me to join the rest of my team on the ground in Sierra Leone. With amazing friends like Yanoh Jalloh in the U.S., who immediately joined my passion, we got to work doing what we had been theorizing and researching on for a while.

It has not been easy by no stretch of the imagination and I plan on doing a couple of blog posts about the good and the challenges. For now, all I will say is we are in 4 communities and have held community/family engagement events in each community, with about 100 people and 60 family applications and counting. We’ve built partnerships with four organizations all over Freetown and identified the 10 children from these organizations that we will be placing, meeting our goal for our pilot year, which ends this month. There is so much work that goes into that and we are so very careful (painstakingly and to the frustration of many of our staff, families etc), but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thank you all for your support and there is no greater gift on my birthday than when reviewing our documents seeing that the letter for our approval was stamped August 14^th a year ago, a day before my birthday. Even though we officially received tax exempt status July 30^th, we didn’t get the notification till around my birthday. We also of course now have our Ministry of Social Welfare certificate after waiting for so long (one of the many challenges I will talk about later).

So once again thank you and you can continue to support by donating directly to our paypal and sending to: sudusalone@gmail.com or going on our website or depositing to our U.S. account: BB&T Account # 0000258020391/Routing number: 051-404-260or Cash app: $jnice200 or we can figure out other means, just email us info@sudusalone.org. If your company does matching donations then check us out on Benevity.

Happy Birthday to me!

Peace and love,

© Voice of the Salone Diaspora