My summer session of school has ended and it always amazes me how much time I have when it ends! Not only does school take time to attend, and do the work, it takes up some space in my head as well. So, now that it's out of my head and off the calendar, I am free to ramp up the training as well as the fundraising!
As of this date, we have raised $665; which includes matching gifts, but we are on our way to some nice funds to continue our construction of the classroom block. Our fundraising goal this year is quite high, but it goes with our hopes, they are high this year! We raised over $3,000 last year and have hopes to raise $5,000 this year. I will be happy with whatever we raise, because we continue to work hard and keep our sites on our goals for Malawi. Some is better than none...In addition, we have been given the wonderful blessing of having a rental car donated by Enterprise rent-a-car in Westfield, to help us keep costs down for Karen's Ride! We are ecstatic about this and grateful and intend to promote and thank them as publicly and often as we can for their generosity to support this event!
We have some incentives to offer this year, so I thought I would begin sharing some of that info so people can get excited with me. For those donating $50 or $100 (not matched), they will be automatically entered into a drawing for a special prize. Below is one of the prizes that will be in the $100 'basket' - I brought it back with me from Malawi when I was there in May, and it is a beautiful piece of finished fabric that could be used in many ways; as a table cloth, skirt, shawl/wrap or wall hanging!
It is a beautiful fabric, a nice heavy weight; it could almost even be used as a throw on the couch to cover you if you got cold. I will continue to update items that are being added to the basket, but this is a wonderful incentive, I think, toward a worthy cause.
With that said, we have received some photos of the groundbreaking and beginnings of the teacher's house construction. We are very excited about this project and we worked very hard in the past year to raise the funds for this project!
The beginning of the foundation....the bricks had been made by the community, but a local team of builders is completing the actual work.
I love the view of the mountains in the background of this area.
Educate Malawi, Inc. is working on so many exciting things with so many wonderful people! We have the first 5k run coming up in November, a couple months after my ride, and it is shaping up quite nicely! For those of you who don't know, we have been providing educational scholarships for a while now and it has been quite a challenge. About a year ago, through a few degrees of separation, we met some folks who were also interested in providing scholarships to women in Malawi. The short version is that we have begun to work more closely in recent months and as a result, we are gaining some momentum with the scholarship program. The Daughters of Toleza Scholarship Fund is the benefitting program of Educate Malawi and Shannon Massey a co-founder of Educate Malawi and Suzanne Bansley, co-founder of Daughters of Toleza Scholarships, are organizing this exciting race. For more details about The Daughters of Toleza, visit their website: http://daughtersoftoleza.org/
And for information about the fun run and road race:http://daughtersoftoleza.org/?page_id=247
More to follow about all the updates of Educate Malawi and Karen's ride as well as all the other events and exciting happenings! Peace and Zikomo,
Karen
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