Never Never Land: Islamabad IKF

The back of our office where the VDP prototype's are being built. We're literally out in farmland where I can smell the livestock.

I've been working at the Islamabad IKF office since I came back. This means I've been working with Ms. Huma, the executive director and her team here instead. The Lahore office was more geared towards the Youth Mobilization Campaign, whereas the work here is more involved in the Village Development Program. However, the two are not disconnected. Last week, Mariam and I (the executive assistant who just left the office because she's moving to Karachi), gave 5 presentations to different grade levels at the Westminster College here in Islamabad. We talked to them about the VDP because they were having an event to raise funds for IKF. I seriously wanted to smack some of these kids. Some of the boys literally started laughing while we showed a video from the actual flood. Another one said something along the lines of how the flood victims didn't need school because they were just going to grow up to be farmers anyway. But then the good hearted students who wanted to get involved in the summer village development program came and asked for more details afterwards and made it all worthwhile.

Some of the stalls at the food festival

Saturday was the international food festival held by the Westminster College. They had stalls set up for different places including: USA, UK, Canada, Mexico, South America, China, Japan, Myanmar, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Africa, Egypt, Yemen, Italy, Norway, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, India, and the four provinces in Pakistan. As an IKF representative, I was asked to be a judge for the food. Yep. I ate from every single one of those stalls. I was insanely full at the end. And had to take a lot of insulin! I was totally thinking of Amar Bhai and how jealous he would be! It was a lot of fun, and it was nice to see the kids get so involved. They had to learn about their country and had help from the embassies, and also set up visual displays. Some of them were really neat, like the Saudi stall had a little diwaniya set up in a classroom with arabic music playing. The Punjab stall had boys in dhotis doing bhangra. Hawaii had coconuts and hula dancers. I think some of my favorites were Saudi, Malaysia, South America and Hawaii. All in all, it was good.