donations, Donations, DONATIONS!

Donations for our August trip have been coming in like wild fire!!!!!!!!! WOWZA! On our March trip to Ghana I discovered pillow case dresses (I know, where I have been, right?) and after a quick facebook status I had a load of women ready to start sewing! The end results have been trickling in already!

On the same day I posted on facebook about the pillowcase dresses a friend, Laura, sent me an email about a dress pattern she had designed that could be made out of men’s button down shirts. The cool thing was, she hadn’t even seen my facebook status! She had just coincidently been thinking that she could try out her new pattern and sew some dresses for our next Ghana trip! Perfect! I also love hearing the little stories of how our sewing gals collect their donations for the material. Here is a fun excerpt from one of Laura’s recent emails:

Just wanted to touch base with you! I've actually only received 2 donations of shirts... but here's the fun part. One guy handed me a bag of 40 shirts and the other came from a 3rd grade class from a Des Moines school with about 60 shirts!!!! They saw my facebook request and decided to make it a social studies project to collect the shirts and follow along with the project! The other donation came from a couple from Boone. The wife had lunch with a friend of mine who mentioned looking for extra shirts and she told my friend she had just cleaned out her husband's closet and wasn't sure what she was going to do with all the extra dress shirts!! Many still had tags!! Name brand stuff too!! Washable silk... Nautica... Izod... Hilfiger... these girls are going to be stylin'!!

Love it! Here’s a picture of some of Laura’s finished dresses made out of the men’s button down shirts:

Don't you just LOVE them?!?! Other than clothing, we've also of course been getting lots of books for the library and school! One of the mom’s in the Kingdom Hoops program is a teacher at Ballard. She organized shoe and book donations for Asikuma. The great thing was, she had all the teachers save their old textbooks and teaching materials that were going to be thrown away (!) after this year. Earlier this week Jake picked up boxes and boxes and boxes of school items (everything from encyclopedias to activity books to audio equipment to math counting blocks).

We really hit the jackpot with that one! Of course we aren’t going to be able to get all of these items over to Ghana in our extra suitcases alone, so Dawn Vander Weide has started sending shipments over to Nana and Esi (our in-country Isaiah 1:17 Foundation staff members) just this week. We think we’ve worked out the kinks from the last shipping attempt. The recent shipment of items contained 16 boxes, weighed in at 405 pounds, and contained books, clothing, tools (for August construction), and of course SHOES!!!! We have gotten a TON of shoe donations!!!!!!! We’ve already sent two truckloads over to the Vander Weide house in which the shoes get cleaned up, packaged and shipped.

On the recent shoe shipment there were 211 pairs of shoes sent. These will be dispersed to the children at Asikuma Presbyterian Primary School.

Thank you to all of you for collecting and giving these donations!!!! Currently we are busting at the seams with material donations and are in higher need of monetary donations which will go towards the building materials for August construction. You can follow along with the amount raised up on my sidebar. Please spread the word about our projects and mission for Asikuma, Ghana! Thanks!