Community support
Direct Maintenance is proud to support the local communities close to our line station locations. It may only be small help, but it is received with great warmth and gratitude and lots of smiles.
In many cases the free bagage allowance is not fully used when travelling, providing great opportunities to make donations in the regions. For example, children's clothing and shoes have been collected in Dutch schools attended by the children of Direct Maintenance staff, which have then been delivered personally to the Nairobi orphanage of the Ongata Rongai Women's Association. This association, run by the impressive Mrs Mary, looks after children who's parents have died due to AIDS. The association provides food, clothing, education and most importantly : a home.
Recently we learned that a girl's football team in the Soweto district of Mombasa was actually playing football without proper clothing and without football shoes. Direct Maintenance as well as Martinair Holland staff have ensured that the girls of Soweto can now really play football. We wish them luck in their compition and look forward to hearing their results!
Another project took place at the city of Samburu, Kenya, to support a school for disabled children. Direct Maintenance was approached by a Dutch aid organisation which was aiming to teach the children at this school to become as self-supportive as possible. This included learning to grow their own vegetables in the garden next to the school building. But for growing vegetables one needs water and a water basin to store water in times of plenty. Samburu lies very close to the routing of the main potable water line between Nairobi and Mombasa. Every 2 months this water pipe is drained for maintenance reasons. The water coming available is of perfect quality for use in the garden, but how to store large quantities of water in Kenya...? As it was impossible to purchase water tight foil in Kenya, in a join effort together with our German customer Condor and our logistics partner Fast Forward Freight, this foil was shipped from Amsterdam via Frankfurt to Mombasa in Kenya free of charge. Three days of hard work to apply the foil were needed to create a huge water basin. By now this water basin is in use and the garden produces perfect vegetables and fresh fruit. A warm Thank You to everybody involved for the lovely contributions.
