Dinner Draw

The dinner draw ticket was pulled tonight by the waitress at the Brig Pub with friends and organizers Monica, Anne, Jim and Sheron and myself present and the winner is:

Elaine Nessman of Cobble Hill, BC and she is a school teacher at Bench School and also a Dragon Boat Diva. Congratulations Elaine.

We raised a whopping $3,400 selling these tickets. Thanks to all who bought tickets and helped sell them. A job very well done. Thanks to you all. The real winners here are the children in Nepal.
A special thanks to Monica for coming up with this fundraising idea and for selling the most tickets.

Hattiban School

I received these photos yesterday of the Hattiban school. As you will remember we had these tables, benches and cupboards made in the spring and have since had the walls painted. I am showing the before and after pictures and I am sure you will agree that it is a huge improvement for the children. These are the two classrooms of the youngest children, nursery and kindergarten. Hopefully we will be able to improve some more classrooms later.

Tour to Nepal

Hi Everyone:

I am planning to do a tour to Nepal in the Fall of 09 if enough people are interested. I have had a number of sponsors ask if they can come to Nepal with me. In giving it some thought I think it would be better if it was done as a group tour as in the spring I am too busy working to really give my attention to anything else.
This would include a trek for those that wish it or volunteering at a school if that is your interest. Sponsors can visit their child and school as well as see the sights of Kathmandu and Pokhara.
This is in the very infant stages of planning. First I would like to know who would be interested to see if it is worth doing. Just email if you think you may be interested. There will be a information meeting later.

Just a couple of things of note. First for local sponsors we will be having a booth at the end of my driveway this weekend for the Tall Ships Festival in Maple Bay. We will be selling dog biscuits, Nepali items and dinner draw tickets again.
September 6th we will be having another garage sale at Ray's Second Hand Furniture. I have quite a lot stuff to sell again and have more promised.
September 17th (date to be confirmed later) I am having a presentation at the Maple Bay Rowing Club. This is a information and social evening to show slides of the highlights of the last year in Nepal.

Work at Chimkhola School Started

We gave a donation of $500 last week to the Chimkhola School Board to start work on cementing a floor, making two new blackboards and anything else they needed to start with. Once they have done one floor we will know the exact cost of this. They were in Kathmandu and bought the supplies to take back to the village. The cement will have to be transported to Chimkhola by donkey and so it could take some time. Mann will go there in a couple of weeks and see how they are progressing. They are very excited about it. Once we know the costs hopefully we will be able to do some more work. The photo is of the trail that the supplies will travel to the school and as you can see it is difficult.

The children have been all visited in the last month by Mann and Jagat and all are doing well.

Canada Day Success

Yesterday was Canada Day for us here in Canada and our booth was set up early to sell dog biscuits, Nepali handicrafts and dinner draw tickets. We did very well making $330 from biscuits, handicrafts and donations. Plus we sold $220 worth of dinner draw tickets. This was a great day and we thoroughly enjoyed talking to everyone about NEF and greeting many old friends. The parade was the best yet out of the six years it has been running. It is a real local community event.

Again thank you to everyone who came by to say hello and to all who contributed to our sales. Special thanks to my dog walking friend, Barbara for helping all day and her great salesmanship. She even had one of my Nepali Christmas cards in her hat to show people what we did last year. It is so wonderful for me to have such support.

Thanks also to the Pictorial for a very good article on NEF, it certainly brought people out to meet us.

I have had a donation for 4 sewing machines for our newly planned sewing program in Pokhara. I am hoping to get this started later in the year. Certainly now with the success of these sales we have the ability to get this up and running.