My Parasites are Going Home

Quick post tonight because I am EXHAUSTED.  But there a couple important things I want to cover here.

First, we have exceeded our fundraising goal!  We raised over $17,000 in total.  So amazing!!  I really badly wanted to make that goal before I hit Uganda, and it has happened!!  It gives me a lot of hope and confidence that this project is really going to succeed.  Or at least that I'll be able to do some good in trying.

Second, I am in transit.  I'm currently spending the night in the Washington Dulles airport.  In just spent an awesome three days with my best friend from college, Sarah at her home in Denver.  We saw a fabulous musical starring one of her amazingly talented friends from high school, ate so much good food that I won't get until....who knows when, snuggled her beautiful new baby girl, and of course talked and talked.

On my way to the airport from my parent's house with all my stuff in all my early-morning glory.

Sarah is an incredible and supportive friend, and has volunteered to take on selling some of the paper-bead jewelry I brought back in December from my beautiful Ugandan women.  I can say with near certainty that whatever I make from selling that jewelry will go straight to paying a Ugandan's salary.  So if you're at all interested in buying some, make sure you have liked my facebook page!  (www.facebook.com/recyclingforhope)

Saying goodbye to my 12-year-old puppy.  I will miss her more than nearly anything else.  

But for now, I am sleeping in the airport.  I was trying to figure out why all my friends out here are so dang responsible and I don't have anyone out here chilling with me in the airport at 2:30 am....  I'll have to work on finding some irresponsible friends :-)  My flight out here went well, though they almost didn't let me on the plane.  United Airlines told me my flight had been revoked by Ethiopian Airlines.  I nearly went into cardiac arrest.  After much panic and a few high-stress phone calls, we found out Ethiopian apparently just has a ridiculous policy that all their travelers have to check their bags, show their passport AND the credit card they used to purchase the flight (good thing I have it!!) at their own ticket counter here.  So stupid.  So the near heart attack was for nothing, but now rather than sleeping in the dead quiet terminal, I am sleeping next to the doors by the ticket counter.  Lovely.  

This is my camp out for the night.  Doesn't it look so warm and inviting?

I just have to make it to tomorrow at 11:00 am and I will be in the air, heading over seas.  Full disclosure: I honestly don't remember the last time I was this nervous for something.  Last year I was like a shot out of a cannon as soon as I got word I could go, you couldn't hold me back.  But this year I know what I'm heading into, so that anticipation of the unknown isn't there, but the desire to want things to work out really badly is.  So I'm left feeling nervous.  I don't particularly like that feeling.  I do think once I finally hit the ground in Uganda I will just feel at home again and have the calm assurance like I did before I left that everything is going to work out.  And my cousin Richard pointed out I probably don't have butterflies, it's probably the parasites that have been giving me so much grief since I came home.  I'm not nervous, they're just excited to back to their motherland. Keep your fingers crossed for me anyway.  Oh, and I think I found a place to live once I'm there!  I need to see the place first, but it sounds great.  


The next post I write will be from Gulu!  I can't wait!

One-Way Ticket to Ride

Hello world!

Good news and bad news.  Bad news first, I haven't hit $10,000 yet.  The good news is, I am only $130 away from hitting $10K.  And that is BEFORE I get the $1K from that donor.  Yes!  So that really means I'm about to hit $11K!!  Woohoo!!

Garage Sale number two - look at all those clothes!!

Quarter for a Cookie!  These are my parents (and yep, that's my dad enjoying his own baking skills.) 

Our second garage sale obviously didn't go quite as well as the first, but we did make $610.93 which is still pretty remarkable, I think.  And I've posted a few items on some online classifieds, and even sold a few things that way, so our total fundraising efforts from a bunch of donated goods add up to $1927.25.  Hahaha, looking at that number just makes me happy!  Isn't that amazing?!

Sold these suckers for $45 bucks online. 

Our fundraising totals, including the donors I committed before leaving Uganda,  are now at........

$14,869.25!


 Wow, wow, WOW.  I kinda can't believe I'm that close to my goal.  But I am, so I went ahead and did it yesterday - I bought my plane ticket.  I'm heading to Denver on May 29 (two weeks from yesterday, yikes!) to hang out with my best friend from college, Sarah, and then will fly Ethiopian Airlines out of DIA on a one-way ticket to Entebbe, May 31st. 

I'm totally convinced Ethiopian is the best way to fly to Africa.  Anyone care to debate?

I'm really excited and a little bit nervous.  Nervous about the project, I mean.  I just want it to work out so badly!  Fingers, toes, legs, all crossed in high hopes that it will! 

Garage Sale Success

This is getting exciting!  Well, let's be honest, I've been excited for a while, but now it's getting serious.  I am $13 dollars away from hitting a major goal.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let's go back to Saturday....

It was FREEZING.  It was May 5th and I swear it felt like January 5th.  My parents and I were up till midnight the night before baking gingersnaps, brownies, muffins, rice crispy treats, and chocolate chip cookies, then woke up at the lovely hour of 5:30 am to hang up posters and pull everything out of our garage.  The wind was blowing 70mph (OK, for you Wyoming folks where the wind literally blows at 70mph, it wasn't that bad, but it was windy and cold!)  It was overcast and I was just sure it was going to rain.  But we were not to be deterred!  My aunt showed up just before 7:00 with my nieces and little cousin to sell the baked goods, and Aunt Jenny (who, along with her husband, is a champion garage-seller,) went straight to work organizing and sorting.

We set up the front lawn a little like a living room, and had four tables of clothes in the driveway.  More tables with Christmas stuff and kitchen stuff, kitchen counters and cabinets and luggage and vacuum cleaners to the side, bikes and baby strollers and car seats in the middle of the driveway just in front of all the toys.  A second entertainment set and the washer and dryer in the garage with jackets hanging off the open garage door.  My mom sat at the checkout table along with my Ugandan women's jewelry for sale.  You getting the picture?

There's my mom, sporting her Wright Panthers ear warmer.  And people with arm-fulls of stuff!

We had a few hard-core garage sale-ers show up at 7:00, though they didn't buy anything.  Disappointing.  A few more shoppers who started giving me money around 7:30.  Better.  I figured we'd make at least $100 bucks at this rate.  But by 8:00 we were movin' and a-shakin'.  Hustlin' and a-bustlin'.  Well, actually, I tried really hard not to hustle anyone, but since all of what we had to sell were donations, there were truly a few questions I couldn't answer.  Though I'm not much of a garage-sale goer, I felt pretty comfortable haggling with people.  Living for a year in a country were there is no set price on anything will do that to you.  But my poor mother felt like we were being ripped off anytime anyone wanted a bigger bargain than the one we were offering.  But by the end of the day, she was wheelin' and a-dealin' with the best of 'em!  (How many more of those idioms can I throw in here??  Rockin' and a-rollin'?  Last one, promise.)

I truly don't know how all those people are standing around without coats on.  But in other news, we had VHS on sale for a buck a piece and tons of them sold!  Who knew that many people still use their VCRs!? 

The sun finally decided to show its face around 11:30, though it was cold enough that my mom still refused to take off her winter coat and ear warmers.  My friend Les had come to help out and play the role of the strapping young man who loaded heavy objects into customer's cars, and he took off at noon because I thought we were done.  At 12:30 however, massive amounts of people were still showing up, so I took off to take our apparently very effective posters down.  We had to drive to Boise that afternoon for my sister's baby's blessing the next morning, and it was very obvious people weren't done with garage sales when I thought they would be.  By 2:00 we were finally moving everything back into our garage, and my oldest brother showed up to help out.  He was asking how much I thought I'd made and I told him I figured at least $500, though I was hopeful it was $800. 

We hit I-15 North around 2:30 and I finally got a chance to organize the fat wad of cash in our till and start filling the coin rolls with quarters.  My mom promptly fell asleep and my dad tuned into his audio book, while I excitedly counted and passed by the $500 dollar mark very quickly.  I let out a silent squeal of excitement when the $800 mark came and went and I still had an enourmous amount of $1 bills to get through.  Total count?

Drumroll please.....


$1,218.52!!!

I had hoped so hard we'd make $1,000, but with the large load we had to move back into our garage, I just didn't think think we'd sold that much.  But we did!  We exceeded it!  It was such a good feeling!  And we seriously have SO much stuff leftover (including the washer and dryer - how did that not sell?) that we're heading to my little brother's house in Provo this Saturday for a second sale.

We only sold ONE piece of my 20 pieces of Ugandan jewelry (to my aunt - thanks Jenny!) so my BF, Sarah, and I are planning to organize an online sale (tune in for more details in the near future!)  But, that was still another $15 we raised.  Every bit counts.

And lastly, money from the Friends of Friends fundraiser continues to trickle in and we are now at $7,754!!!  That is more than I anticipated from only committing 75 people!  I have so many amazing friends and family!  (Have I said that before?  Can I say it enough?) 

So, garage sale, jewelry sale, and friends fundraiser, together total $8,987.52!  Which means I am $12.48 away from having raised $9,000.  Once I reach $9K, I have a donor who has promised to donate $1,000.  Wow!!  That will put me at $10,000!!!  Yippee!!  My goal all along has been to raise between $10-$12K.  I think I will get $12.48 tomorrow, which means everything from the second garage sale, the jewelry sale, and the remaining friends still getting friends to donate, (have you donated your $10 yet?  www.RecyclingForHopeUG.com) will just advance me to that $12,000 goal.  AMAZING!  I can't believe how fast it has all happened.  It's just so exciting!

I've been pricing tickets, and I've applied for my visa, so it looks like I'll be shipping out at the end of this month!  Hooray!!  I seriously cannot WAIT to get back to Gulu, to start riding my little bicycle around town soliciting recyclers, to start painting recycling boxes with logos, and to get more women employed, provide more girls with educational opportunities, to have more stunning houses built, and to help Ugandans take pride in their beautiful environment!  Does that sound idealistic?  Incredibly.  But I've always thought of myself as a realistic idealist, and I really think it's all gonna happen!

Cheers to everyone who has helped me get this far!!

Full-Time Fundraising

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, after two serious weeks of fundraising, our Friends of Friends Fundraiser has brought in a total of $6,854!!!!  Wow, wow, WOW!  The most remarkable thing about this is, it's April.  April means, babies and weddings and finals and graduations and moving and all manner of other things.  So I've only had about half my army of fundraisers able to bring in money the last couple weeks.  And we are well over halfway to our goal!  Let's give our fundraisers a big round of applause, shall we??  Come on, they deserve it!

And let me tell you, being on the receiving end of all this money is a little overwhelming.  When people I know and love are forking over large chunks of change, and telling all their friends how amazing this project I'm trying to start is, and then their friends start forking over large chunks of change, it puts on the pressure!  I get a little giddy every time a PayPal payment shows up in my inbox, and I'm so happy every time I'm able to figure out whose friend it is that donated.  My friends have such great and generous friends!  Sending out thank you's and tax info has become a full-time job.  One that I relish.  Every $10 donation brings us closer to getting this recycling project started. Fingers crossed, that start will be the end of May!!

In other news, I've been working on putting together a garage sale.  My friend Ericka gave me the idea - said she raised a load of money doing a humanitarian garage sale one year.  Starting this project has led me to do all kinds of things I ain't never done before - a garage sale being one of them.  In my family, if we had something we didn't need anymore, we just gave it away.  So this is all new to me, and if anyone has any pointers, I'm all ears. 

I started talking to the people in my neighborhood, and then Saturday my parents and little brother helped me knock on every door and hand them a flyer asking for donations for the garage sale.  Wednesday was the pick up day and my mom and I drove around the streets hauling away goodies left on people's porches (marked for us, we didn't steal anyone's porch chairs, I promise,) We wound up with quite the loot!  And this is just the beginning!  So many houses said they had stuff for us, they just weren't ready to give it to us yet, but check out this garage: 

This is a garage to have a sale out of, no?  In this stash you see a washer and dryer, two entertainment centers, a TV, four bicycles, an electric fireplace, kitchen cupboards, and of course loads of books, clothes, dishes...I mean, there is a lot of stuff here!  If anyone in the area wants to donate their spring cleaning stash, I will gladly come take it off your hands!  If anyone in the area wants to buy some of this awesomeness, come early Saturday morning, May 5th!  It's gonna be fun!


Here's to getting Recycling for Hope started off very very soon!  Thanks everyone, for your donations, both monetary and....stuff. 

100 Friends, 1,000 Donations, 10,000 Dollars

Guess what?!  In less than a week, we've raised a total of $2,660!!  Yippee!!  We are on the right track!

In case this is the first you've heard of it, let me clue you in:

We are doing what I'm calling the Friends of Friends Fundraiser.  I am asking 100 friends and family to commit to asking ten of their friends for $10.  That means each friend will end up with $100, and if I have 100 friends with $100 to donate, then I have $10,000!  Like my friend Brett said, the math is really good, but will it work?  Well, we'll see. 

Essentially, I'm looking for one-thousand $10 donations, and with $2,660 raised, that means I am at 266 ten-dollar donations.  In actuality, I've had some wonderfully generous people donate, so I haven't really had that many people donate, but whatever the number, I'm exceedingly grateful!  I've given everyone two weeks to raise the money, and April 26th is the deadline, so with just over a week to go we're a bit low to hit our mark.  However, I know everyone is trying really hard, and I couldn't ask for more.  I have great faith that this fundraiser will be highly instrumental in my going back to Uganda.  I have great faith I will be able to start this recycling project.  I have great faith that together, we are all going to accomplish something wonderful. 

So I have two questions for all my readers;

First - if you're not already, do you want to be one of my 100 friends and help raise $100?  If so, shoot me an email, leave a comment below, call me, or fly a banner over my roof (actually, forget the banner, donate those funds, and just knock on the door.)

Second - if you can't be one of my 100 friends, will you donate $10?  That's all I'm asking for folks, $10.  Like my friend Rachel said, that's a meal at Chipotle.  So eat spaghetti tonight instead and donate $10!

Everyone who has followed this blog has been so amazingly supportive, and I am so thankful for all the love I've felt in a very foreign land.  I really believe in this project and want be back in Uganda for one more round, so please do what you can to help me out.

If you haven't seen my website yet, check it out!  www.RecyclingForHopeUG.com  It's a bit bare, hoping to remedy that soon, but the donate button is there, and the back story is here on the blog.  And of course, if you have any further questions, don't hesitate to ask!

Let me leave you with our video, and tell me what you think!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJTh4CIE1g

Recycling for Hope

I hadn't been in Gulu for more than a week when I asked David, my office mate at the time, where I could take my old water bottles.  I was beginning to feel guilty for all the waste I knew I would accumulate throughout the year since tap and well water is undrinkable.  He looked at me smugly and in a you're-obviously-new-here-and-have-no-clue kind of voice informed me, "There's no recycling center in Gulu."  I was surprised, and to this day, I do not think it was naive of me to be.  Gulu had been terrorized for 20 years.  The town had spent the last four years rebuilding itself almost entirely, and every NGO and development initiative imaginable had been involved.  How had recycling been left out so completely?

I was just sure it hadn't.  So I started asking around and found out about a church that was supposedly making gift cards out of recycled paper.  Well, it was a start.  I began trying to track it down so I could ask if they could use my waste paper.  It turns out, it wasn't a church - but a church's initiative, and it wasn't gift cards, it was sanitary pads.  They gladly accepted the paper I brought, and gave me a full tour.  I watched the women pulping the paper with a huge mortar and pestle, mixing it with papyrus leaves and laying it out to dry in the sun.  I saw them sizing and cutting and stitching and sterilizing.  My mind was blown.  This was so much cooler than anything I had been imagining.

Pads make from recycled paper - amazing!

A couple weeks later I returned, my head swimming with questions about their waste paper needs.  I was able to talk to the director who told me about how in addition to giving the sanitary pads to school girls along with an education program, they take in formerly abducted women, or battered women, or victims of sexual abuse.  They counsel with them, and of course, being church affiliated, teach them the gospel, and finally teach them a livelihood.  She also told me how they wanted to expand their efforts, and how they could use all the waste paper from all of Northern Uganda, but currently were forced to buy nearly all their paper and ship it up from Kampala.  Before I really knew what I was saying, I blurted out, "I am your woman!  I will get you more paper!"  I don't think I walked out of the compound that day, I floated.

The poster a friend made to advertise our concert.

Unfortunately, I left for the Galapagos shortly thereafter, (not that going to the Galapagos is ever truly unfortunate...) and almost immediately upon returning my job went from not-enough-to-do to three-people-should-have-my-job.  A couple months later though, I met Pilgrim Metts.  Pilgrim (and yes, that is his real name, and yes, he has white-man dreads) wound up in Gulu for the summer sort of by accident, and he didn't have anything to do.  I told him he needed to run my recycling project for me.  He agreed, he did.  We worked on it a bit together that summer, and though we weren't able to get nearly as much accomplished as either of us would have liked, (though we did put on a great benefit concert together!) through the meetings, the attempts, and all the discussions I had with people, I came to see just how passionate about this project I really was.  It took everything I had to continue working on the micro-enterprise project I was responsible for, rather than just bucking it altogether and concentrating solely on recycling.

Made entirely from water-bottle bricks! 

A week after Pilgrim left, I randomly found myself in a van full of female expats I'd never met, including a girl carrying an inordinate amount of empty water bottles.  I asked, "Why all the bottles?" and she told me they were building houses out of them.  My eyes lit up and my brain started churning.  I asked her if I could donate my own bottles??  (All the while trying to figure out how in heaven's name I hadn't met this girl before?!)  She answered with an emphatic yes, and said she was always trying to get as many as she could.  About a month later I brought her a large box full of water bottles and talked to her about my latest ideas for my recycling program.  I needed to know, could they handle the capacity of bottles I was prepared to get for them?  She said yes.  Would they be able to pick them up from the collected locations?  She said yes.  So I told her of my current dreams of going home and fundraising for the money to come back in 2012 and do the recycling program full time.  Could they wait four months for this?  She said yes. I don't think I walked out of the compound that day, I floated.

A few days later Elizabeth (water bottle recycling woman) called and said there was a dinner she wanted to invite me to.  There I made two important contacts - first a guy named James who wanted to start a new initiative in his existing NGO using old grocery sacks.  They would be ironed and re-purposed into what looked and felt like patent leather, then sewn into useful things like Kindle cases to be sold here in the US.  He was very interested in my proposed project and even wanted to pay me for the materials I found for him.  Second was a blessed man named Noah who asked me what I needed to get started on my project.  "I need about $3,000 to get the recycling boxes cut - that's the first thing."

Prototype of the boxes Noah agreed to buy. 

"Oh, well, I can give you $3,000."  ......  Seriously? .....  Just like that?  So, that did it in my mind.  If this guy was willing to fork over that much money, that easily, then I would do this project.  I would do everything in my power to make it a reality.  About a week before leaving Gulu I had another man promise me about $2,000 after a five minute conversation.

I came home at Christmastime with a goal to be back in Gulu with an additional $12,000 by mid-February.  A bit of an unrealistic goal, I'm now realizing, but which I blame on saints like Noah and P. Jackson for donating funds so plentifully and willingly.  I've had some rough patches and had to re-examine my goals and aspirations and methods several times, but every time I've come to the same conclusion, I need to make Recycling for Hope a reality.  And I fully believe I will.

I have had wonderful support from so many wonderful people, and I currently have an army of nearly 100 people helping me fund raise and network and get online and on and on.  How does one girl get so lucky?  Together, we will make Recycling for Hope a reality.  Just watch us!

(Visit www.RecyclingForHopeUG.com to learn more and make a donation!)

Website banner created by the lovely and talented Courtney O'Dell

Born a Leader, Died a Friend

Obviously, I dropped off the blogging earth.  Life went crazy, it got hard, and blogging something upbeat seemed too difficult.  So I just stopped for a while.  And then it felt like I had to do so much catching up that I felt overwhelmed at even attempting that.  So I've decided there will be no catch-up.  If you really want to know about the last four months of my time in Gulu, shoot me an email and I'll happily fill you in.

No, now is the time for me to start afresh, to blog about my new project, and all the successes that I am certain are going to happen therein.  But first, there is one catch-up post I need to write.  It regards something I haven't been able to talk about to anyone.  I haven't told a soul.  The current project manager of Paper to Pearls told me, so we discussed it a bit, and then Barbara, the director of Paper to Pearls called me one day and we spoke briefly about it.  But that's it.  I haven't told anyone out loud that Sarah passed away.

Sarah Akot - the beloved chairwoman of the Gulu co-operative for Paper to Pearls -the woman I accompanied to the Galapagos, and the woman who single-handedly showed me how much potential every single woman in Gulu has, died on February 11th of....well, we don't really know.  It looks like she had many health complications.  She always complained of having an ulcer that bothered her, but I was unaware that she had AIDS, so in the end, I guess the doctors decided it was a combination of that, diabetes, and high blood pressure.

I haven't been able to tell anyone, because there isn't a single person I know who fully understands what Sarah means to me and what she did for me.  I'm blogging about it now because I'm still not ready to discuss it out loud, but I feel unable to continue blogging until I address the issue in some form.  So I will try to express what Sarah meant to me exactly, and why I'm devastated at her loss.

I would have quit if it hadn't been for her.  And she doesn't even know that.  She showed me the ropes because the past project manager refused to respond to any of my pleas for help, so it was Sarah who took me to Kampala, and got lost with me trying to find all the places I needed to go to pick up supplies.  Sarah told me how to be tough with the women so they didn't take advantage of me.  And when things got really hard and it felt like none of what I was going through was worth it, I could think back on the moment Sarah danced like a rock-star in front of a room full of admiring artists in Ecuador and I saw the worth of an individual.  Then I knew I was working for the individual women - not for me, not for the demanding director and client back in the States, but for the women trying so hard to care for their own and working so hard at something they learned to really excel at.  And then I knew that it was, indeed, worth what I was going through.   And each one of those women were and are capable of more.  And from there I learned that each woman (and man for that matter) living everywhere, are bigger and more capable of the circumstances they currently find themselves in.  That is what Sarah taught me.  

Sarah and I did get along perfectly all the time, that is no secret.  I called her out once in front of all the women for lying to me.  I felt like if I let Sarah get away with lying to me, all the other women would feel like they could do it to.  One woman was so upset with me over it, she nearly quit coming to roll beads.  Sarah and I had been together pretty much 24 hours a day for nearly three weeks straight when we were in the Galapagos.  And let me tell you, there is nothing like waking up to a big ol' naked African woman sleeping in the bed next to yours.  When I got home, I wanted to hide from her - I just didn't want to be around her.  And there was the time I desperately needed help with my project's endless quality control issues, and I hired a young girl from my congregation to be that person.  The women didn't know her and didn't trust her, and she was younger than they were, so they weren't very nice to her.  And I let Sarah have it for not supporting me.  See, I knew Sarah was absolutely the leader of the pack.  The women all looked up to her so much that if she didn't support me, no one would.

But in reality, I had immense amounts of respect for the leader that Sarah was, for how capable she was, for how much initiative she took, and for her creativity.  Sarah filled my version of Gulu.  I simply cannot imagine the place without her.  I don't do well without closure, and that - I have discovered - is why funerals are so important.  Everything I know of Gulu includes Sarah, and my mind refuses to accept that she's not there.  I believe it will continue to do so until I can see for myself she's no longer running things.  I am unavoidably and uncontrollably jealous of the current project manager who was able to be to her burial, to mourn with her family and the Paper to Pearls women.

I truly thought Sarah (who was only 52) would live to be a crazy 80-year-old Acholi woman, spinning stories with deep wrinkles and bossing her great grandchildren around.  I imagined introducing my kids to her when I came to visit for summers with them.  And now stories and photos will have to suffice.  

The last time I saw Sarah. 

It is for women like Sarah who die too young and of a disease that we should be able to better control, that each of us needs to strive to improve the world.  To help the needy and the sick and the uneducated.  For those of us who are healthy, educated and financially stable, I really believe it is our duty as citizens of this world to do our best to improve these issues.  Even if we are only able to improve one person's life.  What if that one person had been Sarah, and I could still have her for my next African adventure?  Each person is just that valuable.

Sarah taught me that.