LitWorld's Creative Director, Dorothy Lee, is in Kenya to launch our data collection project alongside our partners The Children of Kibera Foundation (CoKF), Vera Solutions, and Jennifer Estrada. What follows is her first report from the field at LitWorld's Innovation Hub in Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya. We will post Dorothy's reports as they come in over the next few days while she is in Kibera.

We got to Children of Kibera early and stopped by the Innovation Hub space. The Earth Bench we built last summer is well worn and loved by the feet of many running and jumping children. The library is in good shape. Maureen, one of our inspiring LitClub Leaders, was in the midst of a read-aloud session with a group of students from a nearby school. They were little dears and she had them captivated.

Margot from Vera Solutions and Jen introduced the term "Design Monitoring and Evaluation" and the basic idea of our LitClub data collection project and pilot to the Kibera LitClub Leaders, Jeff, Prisca, Maureen, Geoffrey, Gertrude. They all took the draft of the survey and we had a discussion about the survey questions.

It was simply awesome.

I had a couple of moments where that was all I could think to myself: this is awesome. I could feel the project coming into existence around me. They were asking great questions, and bringing such interesting and informative feedback to us, it made me tingle. And then after we wrapped up, we got to immediately take our notes from the meeting and revise the whole survey before we forgot what anyone said, when it was all just fresh and bubbling away in our brains.

After we finished our debrief, we joined the Power Women Moms LitClub session for a few songs, a check-in, and lots of hugs. Their new salon is up and running next to their shop, the walls are painted with murals and they have thes most wonderful hair sinks in bright colors.

Sending love to you all from all these dear ones here, as well as from myself!

--Dorothy Lee, Creative Director, LiWorld