Happy Birthday, Peter!

 Today my brother, Peter, would have been 50 years old!  He died 20 years ago, when he was only 29 and I was 27.  Below is a picture of him with my daughter, Shannon, who was only about 7 months old in this picture!  This morning, I set out for a bike ride, training must go on, and I got a calf cramp half way up this hill...route 57....It was still a little early, and quiet on the road and while I was stretching my leg and catching my breath, I looked around at the beautiful trees and listened to the quiet.  I love riding my bike out in the hills and quiet areas...it is one of my favorite experiences.  Peter spent a considerable amount of time out in the woods...he hiked a large portion of the Appalachian trail, and this is what I thought of this morning while riding.  I also thought about life and how we choose to spend it.  Recently, someone was trying to convince me that I should be more patient and that 'things take time'.  And while I don't disagree with that in some areas, I have been thinking about it lately.  One thought is that time is not magic, things don't just happen with the passage of time.  So, although perspective could change with time, pain can lessesn with the passage of time, things don't get accomplished with the passage of time in and of itself.  I thought about Malawi and the fact that their average life expectancy is about 54 years old.  So it occurred to me that time may be very different to those in countries like Malawi, where their average lifetime is 54 years; in the U.S. our average life expectancy is about 30 years longer than that.  It makes me wonder how our perspective about life might be different with that reality.

Below I am pictured with a dear friend,  J.R. Allen, Rocky, who has been a supporter of Educate Malaiwi for several years.  He owns the building in which my Internship is taking place, The Carson Center, and he invited Stephen and I to participate in the 25th Anniversary of the building that houses Carson Center and many other woncerful businesses.  It was a networking/celebratory event that was thrilling to be a part of.

Stephen and I set up our table and displayed our items and talked with people about Malawi and what we are doing and we were warmly received.  Rocky donated raffle ticket proceeds to us, to be split with the Carson Center Kamp for Kids.  We are grateful; and I feel like these words are not sufficient to express it adequately.  So there it is...our exciting day 8-14-2013.

Peace to all!

Generous donations and exciting developments!!!

The days are going by so fast now, I can hardly believe it!!

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.

Small utility bag

Shown from L to R, top to bottom:  medium utility bag, large shoulder bag, medium utility bag and small utility bag

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!

The Countdown begins!!

We are in August, and it is at the end of this month that I will begin to ride!

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