PR 2.0 Blogging Workshop with Marlon Parker's Team

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Tomorrow, I am training a team of loyal drug counsellors from Impact Direct Ministries on how to use blogging to get themselves onto television, radio, newspapers or magazines – all things I have done because of my blogging. They are learning fast and furiously about technology from Marlon Parker, senior lecturer at Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Marlon is a Ph.D candidate who is doing his thesis on how technology can be used for social change and conflict management.

Marlon Parker personally trains recovered and reformed drug addicts from the Cape Flats on how to use technology like MXit to do a form of peer-counselling using South Africa’s #1 cellphone-based IM and social network. After meeting Brent Williams, one of the drug counsellors, who came to 3rd annual Digital Citizen Indaba and Highway Africa this year, I resolved to use all the resource to assist them.

Marlon Parker’s work is ground breaking in a global sense. However, the facts speak for themselves because he is doing this with ZERO budget! Yes, he is doing this with sheer willpower and determinations and no corporate or government funding! He is doing what the MXit (Pty) Ltd even with allmighty Naspers Ltd behind it, has not been able to deliver after two years of promises. This MXit/Facebook/cellphone-based online counselling project is helping hundreds of children from the Western Cape to find their way on their own personal hero’s journey.

With your assistance we can reach half of the approximately 9 million users by 2010. The more children we help, the more families we assist, the stronger the communities become in self reliance and mutual aid across South Africa.