Pen pals

Our pen pal program continues with a collaboration with Lee Worthley in Sunderland, MA. Her second grade class is working on letters to send to Malawi. Check out her blog to see her class learn about Malawi. Her blog details almost daily the hard work she does to teach her students a wide variety about their world in a lot of hands-on methods. Keep up the great work, Lee, and thanks for your willingness to share about Malawi and connect the students between here and there!!

http://sunderlandgrade2.blogspot.com/

More later....

It has been some time since I have written...trying to keep up with all the different things we have going on: had our cut-a-thon and the West Springfield, MA DiGrigoli hair salon; we raised $365 with their help....THANKS DiGrigoli!!!!

We have a fundraising concert coming up this Saturday; this is our first attempt at an event like this...we will hope for a good turnout.

We are beginning to get orders for various fabric items...now I will have to get sewing again and trying to recruit some fellow sewers to help with these order! We have beautiful fabrics and some real nice and useful items...I will try to post some photos of those items soon.

We have cards to be sold with new photos from this most recent trip...also might try to share those images as well.

The Pen pal project is still moving forward; we completed our first exchange which was a success and very enjoyable by all. We have another opportunity coming up that we are very excited about. Lee Worthely, a woman I was in High School with (a lifetime ago) teaches second grade and is interested in participating in our program. Sunderland elementary school is where she teaches and she does an amazing job with the children and has a lot of energy, enthusiasm and is an inspirational teacher. Check out her blog to see what I'm talking about!!

http://sunderlandgrade2.blogspot.com/

The photos at the top of the page are from the first pen pal program; the girls in the U.S. are from a residential program and could not be photographed for publication, but their letters are shown above. I uploaded these pics, and thought they were positioned differently...enjoy them , anyway!!

More later....just wanted to update quickly for tonight!

I am attaching the link for the most recent news article printed about our 'happenings'. We have had a couple exciting inquiries this week. As a result of this article, we had a man email saying that he spent time in Malawi in the late 60's. He is in the area frequently, as his daughter, who was born in Malawi, lives near us. We have also received an inquiry from a teacher who is interested in the pen pal program! We are excited about these developments. I hope to be able to attend to these new inquiries while working my other jobs, the paying ones!

We will soon be updating our website, because we have outgrown the one we have used for these past couple years. It is exciting that in these next 6 months I could be retired and have more time to devote to Educate Malawi...I really look forward to that and hopefully it will all go well for me to be able to do that. Always so many things I want to do to fundraise and involve more people...in time, I believe, it will all happen.

http://www.courant.com/community/hc-community-articleresults,0,5942637,results.formprofile?Query=35656HC

Enjoy the article....also, I will be posting photos and some sample letters from the pen pal program. It was exciting and we got some nice pictures and letters.