Sustainable Social Services and Education

Baulini Street Kids Project is a multi service program that provides regular education to orphans, special education to children with disabilities, physical therapy, medication treatment, transitional and skills training as well as other services and supports to the community and families. It is truly a multi services and support organization. While it is partially supported by donors, the majority of its resources comes from self-sustaining activities. They receive no government support at all. Here is a partial listing of what they have built over the years to earn money to sustain their programs:
- raise pigs
- raise chickens
- banana fields
- brick making
- maize (corn) fields
- vegetable gardens (with every imaginable vegtable)
- bakery (sells bread and buns to local vendors and stores)
- feed store
- grocery store
- trade school makes scarves and hats that they knit on machines and sell to local shop keepers
- mushroom growing operation (this is very cool, they have three shack like houses and were taught by an NGO how to raise oyster mushrooms which they now grow and sell to the local grocery stores)
Business sense and social service sense are integrated at Baulini thorugh the leadership of Mikala. They will survive as needed even without any funding.

One of the focuses of our work over the past four years has been to develop a disability leadership team and to encourage and support networking across these organizations. Much good happens in each organization but initially there was no mechanism to share. As an example of the power of this sharing when we were at Cheshire Homes in Livingstone we met a group of Moms who came into the school twice a week to volunteer. They were taught how to make dolls and bags with recycled materials. These dolls are then sold in markets and through a connection in the United States. Mikala saw this activity and we had not been back in Lusaka at Baulini for more then a day before she had identified a person to learn to make the dolls and teach her PTA how to make them. The following day she secured her first outlet for sales at a local market in town. Entrepreneurialism is a celebrated must in this country and the leadership at Baulini and so many organizations here is definitely evident. Daily I think how little we do with so much in the U.S. for people with disabilities and how much they seem to be able to do with so little here in Zambia. There is much we can learn.