I have received many very generous donations from friends and family, I feel truly grateful and blessed! In addition to those generous donations, I have recieved the donation of a car rental from Enterprise rent-a-car in Westfield! A great big huge thank you to Catherine Demers who is the Area Manager for this area for Enterprise. She was super excited to help and it was so nice to have the complete enthusiastic willingness of a business person support this ride.
In addition to this great news, we have received our first shipment of bags sewn in Malawi! Mathew, our project manager for our building project, has been busy getting fabric to local tailors to send us a sampling of what they do. They were paid to sew these bags and we have hopes to increase this portion of our organization as a fundraising endeavor. This is a vision I have had for Educate Malawi for so many years now. Obviously, we have a ways to go with marketing, etc., but we have received our first shipment of bags; 43 total, of varying shapes, sizes and design. We have large, medium and small shoulder bags, small, medium and large utility bags. Photos below are a sampling of the bags and fabrics.
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| Small utility bag |
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| Shown from L to R, top to bottom: medium utility bag, large shoulder bag, medium utility bag and small utility bag |
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| Large shoulder bag |
These are the two medium utility bags
Not only are these bags made in Malawi, the sale of them will return to Malawi to support them in the area of education. In case you haven't been following along, we are building a teacher's house currently in Zomba, Malawi. All the teachers at that school, the Mphata school, walk 9 km each way every day. The community was interested in having at least one teachers house there so that the teacher was less exhausted from the travel; this detracts from the teacher's ability to be as attentive as possible.
Because these bags just arrived from Malawi today, they smell like Malawi to me. If you have not been, you may not like the smell; I would say it is a combination of smoke and dirt (not that the bags are dirty). I don't know how else to explain it, but it brought tears to my eyes and moved my heart when I smelled them.
Tomorrow I plan to be on my bike as early as possible. I hope to ride close to 100 miles this week and for the next 2; because then I will be riding many miles daily for the 8 days of my ride!
So, I will close with that thought in mind so I can get some rest! Remember, donations will be matched up to $1,000 and donations of $50 or $100 (not matched) will be entered to win an exciting prize from Educate Malawi, Inc.!
Zikomo kwambiri!
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