“Thank you” to the Christian family and NGO that is responsible for sniping our lease at the Computer Training Center in Jinja. Ironic that we trained that very same Christian NGO’s staff for years in our center. I caught wind of this subversion months ago, accidentally, when a staff member of the NGO mentioned that they were taking the space. This was news to me, and I took it to be a mistake because we were already renting that space.
As for details, all I can say right now is that after more than four years as a good tenant, this Christian group and it’s associates have cunningly (and with complete plausible deniability) subverted our long-standing agreement with the landlord, taken over the space we were subletting to them and killed our ability to expand. The computer training center had gotten too small. Remember, we train over 1,600 students per year with only 25 computers and obviously we needed to expand the CTC and we needed a hacker space for advanced training. Because of this subversion we would be forced to have the CTC and the hackerspace in two separate locations, doubling our security, infrastructure and utility expenses and requiring us to double our infrastructure investments not to mention putting our equipment at risk by having it spread out.
Even if the landlord changes his mind (which means the NGO backed out), how can I in good conscience put money in his pocket and take the space knowing that as soon as something “better” comes along he’ll dump us .. AGAIN?
Any money we would invest in this place would be at risk.
I’m not sure what the future holds, but we’ll have to close, and relocate to greener pastures. At this point the only thing I can do is to “take the higher road”, make the most of it and pray that there’s something better on the horizon. It just really sucks to be this close financially, to have some momentum from the community only to have to .. start over.
