Well, there is little to explain – I had no money spare in this time to try and get BEN working. I kept it alive with the domain and all the registrations, but my personal financial situation went for a complete “ball of chalk”.
This is not a site for my life issues, but rather preserving Ben’s legacy, however the challenges in the last few years (now while trying to survive Covid) have become increasingly testing. Whilst none of us want this legacy to disappear, its amazing the strange and unusual challenges we have had to endure and overcome in the last 4 years. I bet all of us were wishing we had a chap like Ben around to keep us entertained, and to challenge us all to do better every day, despite our various lockdown/quarantine issues. I am sure he would have been a brilliant inspiration every day…
Our NPO issues though have become more problematic. I have had extreme difficulty with South African banks to try set up the base current account for us to start using. Some of these issues are around the fact that we have 2 awesome international trustees… An awesome presentation as to this organisation, but the banks in this country just need almost everything personal from foreign account holders that I have said “no”.
My next thought is that all 3 off us trustees remove ourselves (I actually haven’t discussed this yet with the others, so they are probably reading for the first time if my email doesn’t get there first). Why is this better? Well all three of us have a very personal link to Bernhard, and we need an organisation that can actually run, rather than being on the sidelines for 4+ years. If BEN is going to represent something, then we need something/someone to push it forward. We have all the tools, but we need a leader/driver to make it happen, and although the current trustees are all dedicated to BEN, none of us have that drive to push it forward.
I know that some of the mission statement might change, but so far our only donation in nearly 9 years has been a single R70k from a single source, donated to a single entity. This is not the ideal goal of BEN.
There are a lot more discussions involved with the trustees, and with Mrs Hiltemann (and any email input sent by interested parties)… But a few things have to be adjusted if we are going to help anyone in Bernhard’s name.
PS: All discussions welcome, our only goal is to do our respect to the person that Bernhard was.