Dear Friends of Soma,
Greetings from SomaTeam members! We trust that this email finds you well. We are hoping each one of you is working on elaborating how to run an activity they promised they would work on. In the meantime, we would like to share with you a few updates:
1.Some progress has been made with two events proposals that were discussed in our last brainstorm meeting:
Friends of Soma night
Under the coordination of the Soma Book Café staff members, we were able to set in motion our 'Marafiki wa Soma Night' event which is scheduled to take place every last Friday of the Month and was (in its planning stages) envisioned to feature music and performances like sarakasi and ngoma from a group of young and upcoming music and performance artists that happen to be friends of Soma. We would like for this event to provide a platform for our friends to get together, know each other, talk leisurely and form their own networks and caucuses while they establish mutually beneficial linkages and forge new friendships. The event is also aimed at providing a relaxing environment where participants are at leisure to eat, drink, dance, perform, and enjoy the small pleasures of playing board games such as chess, bao, cards, monopoly, scrabble, etc. We invite more input from any of you on ways to add vibrancy to the event and make it truly plural, involving and fun (without diverging from our purpose of providing space for leisure, culture and learning). We would as well, greatly appreciate your contribution in mobilizing more people for the last Friday of July event (we will circulate the invitation poster early)—Soma is in need of more friends, you being in the vanguard.
Richard (and Aloyce) event
Under the coordination of Ricard Mziray and Aloyce Makonde, we will soon be hosting another Friday evening event featuring an assortment of literary and performing art forms starting with a 'Vunja Mbavu Comedy Night'. The idea is to start with something, gauge the mood and using audience feedback and further brainstorming among the hosts and the advisory group, experiment with additional literary forms such as poetry, storytelling, music (and ngoma) performances, etc. The dates, themes and posters for the first event are finalized and already in circulation (Please find attached). Let's show some support to Richard and Aloyce by all being there and bringing more people on their debut show. We have also attached a map to Soma to go along with the poster in case there will be some people that don't really know where Soma is.
KARIBUNI SANA!
2. With your inputs, we would like to start putting some of the great ideas for the children program generated during the brainstorming meeting in motion.
Facilitators' tool kit
While working out the logistics of coordinating and promoting the starter activities for children, we believe that if each one of us develops a few visible steps on how to run the activity they said they would develop further we will be able begin on developing a tool kit for readership forum facilitators. This guide will be used to orient volunteers and Somastaff members who will help us work with children to perform those fun learning activities. If it is not too much to ask therefore, we would appreciate it very much if we are able to receive your inputs within the second week of July. This will set us in motion in a tangible way.
School Visits
We are still struggling to figure out how to structure the school visit program, with the view of putting up an interesting package and sending it to schools as soon as they open for the next semester. Your facilitation inputs will be of help. This package will be used to solicit schools' participation and based on the response we receive we will develop a timetable which will be used to solicit inputs of volunteers. Elaine, your inputs will be required here as well to help recruit school based volunteers and for the rest of us we will need your inputs on who else can help us either as a resource person to orient and work with volunteers on a specific date and/or fun learning activity.
Regular week end children and youth programs
We are of the opinion that with only one part time coordinator, the above activities are already a handful for now. Yet it would be really nice to have a regular program for children and youths even once per month to start with. We could use with more externally coordinated/hosted events for young people. If anyone amongst you might be interested and able time wise to chip in, or knows someone who can, it will be a great boost. We could start with small events (open to all children featuring fun games, art activities, story-telling, children film screenings, etc.) for a fee maybe? More ideas and inputs please…
3. We will begin to elaborate on the Annual Literary Festival proposal as soon as the above activities are up and running given that they contribute to the festival. In the meantime we are working on a proposal for a short story writing competition and creative writing camp for women, both of which are tied to the festival. If we target that the festival is to be launched sometime next year, we must target to have it figured out concretely before the end of the year. Thus, we will share with you any progress made in our thought process and continue to ask for your (much needed) ideas and inputs.
We will keep updating you on new developments and we hope to be able to schedule another meeting soon. We hope to receive your inputs soon and see you all in the Comedy event.
Best Regards,
Soma team
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