Need some more help from my friends

I just received another email from Cherokee giving me more details about working at Kechene School and I need your help again in two areas.

First, this list was given to me of some of Kechene's basic needs and I would love to bring as much of this stuff as possible with me. So if you and your family, church, homeschool co-op, etc would partner with me again and help me get this stuff that would be amazing.

School needs: The school doesn’t even have electricity and lacks the resources of even the most basic schools in the US. The following list details the current needs of the school and includes suggestions of items to bring from home. Please, please try to bring some of these items, as they will greatly improve the school.

1. Teaching Aides: the walls of the school are pretty bare and don’t offer the students visual aides from which to learn. Thus, if you can, it’s highly suggested that you bring posters with which to decorate the walls and reinforce learning points. The students have responded extremely well to the posters I have made by hand (I’m an awful artist) and would benefit greatly from other visual aides. Posters are cheap, easy to pack, and rare in Addis Ababa. Anything that offers a visual supplement to English-learning would be a huge help (depictions of emotions, physical characteristics, weather, math, school supplies, basically anything you can find at a teacher’s resource store would be great!)

2. Classroom/school supplies: chalkboard erasers, pencils, pens, pencil sharpeners (individual or for the class), erasers, notebooks

3. Medical supplies: hydrogen peroxide/rubbing alcohol, cotton swabs, antibiotic ointment, a scale to track the growth of students, eye drops, ear drops, nose drops, splints, gauze

4. Funds: teacher salaries, rent, school supplies, door guards, food, and other expenses add up quickly. If you can raise money in any way for Kechene, it will directly improve their quality of life and education.

Second, while I am at Kechene School I will be helping teach. Now, my gift is not teaching so I am going to need a lot of help getting ready to do this! I will need to make lesson plans and come up with ways to engage the children. Now, all you homeschool moms and elementary ed teachers out there I know have learned a few tricks of the trade and I would love love love it if you would help me with this. Here is what I was told:

Teaching Suggestions:

1. Be energetic: The students are young and have short attention spans. Act out things whenever possible, be goofy if necessary, and always engage the students. I found that asking the class questions, getting students to help act out the lesson, and using hand motions to reinforce teaching points were all effective ways to maintain the attention of the class and increase the likelihood of the students remembering what was taught. Basically, the kids will learn more and you will have more fun if you are energetic!

2. Incorporate visual aides: Drawings on the chalkboard, posters on the wall, and any photos you can bring will catch the attention of the students. For example, when teaching the kids adjectives such as tall, short, fat, thin, strong, and weak, I brought pictures from my safari to incorporate into the lesson. They absolutely love to look at photos, especially if you are in them, and it makes the lesson more exciting for them (The giraffe is ____. The hippo is ___.)

3. Prepare lesson plans: Though the concepts you will be teaching are simple, you will be much more effective if you have a game plan heading into each class. Have the concept you plan on teaching, examples, a few questions, and ways to engage the class prepared each day.

4. Learn basic Amharic: For basic communication at the school and in Addis, it is to your advantage to learn some basic Amharic. Particularly at Kechene, learning basic math vocabulary is very helpful, as it allows you can understand and help the children more.

Thank you for all your help and support thus far and please continue to pray for me as I step farther and farther outside my comfort zone to follow God's will.

Job Placement

I got an email today from Cherokee Gives Back- Ethiopia Program with a description of where I will most likely be working.

Probable placement: Kechene School:
Kechene School is located in Kechene neighborhood, one of the poorest in Addis Ababa. All of the students attending Kechene are from destitute families and 36 of the 82 students are orphans. Luckily, the orphaned children are living with relatives in the local community. The school consists of grade levels KG-1, KG-2 and a 1st grade class.
Cherokee Volunteers assist in teaching and tutoring students, serving meals – breakfast and lunch are served daily, organizing games during recess, and helping with overall facility improvement – such as installing a water tank and plumbing for a shower, shelves for organizing the storage room and classrooms, installing trashcans, etc. Volunteers have personally raised funds to support these initiatives and also contributed to Kechene’s overall budget.

I am soooo excited!!

Check List

Check List for going to Ethiopia:

Buy plane ticket- DONE

Buy travel health insurance- DONE

Register trip with the Department of State- DONE

Get vaccinations and prescription medication

Mail Hold Harmless Agreement, Safety and Security Agreement to Cherokee Gives Back

Email Travel Form-Personal Data to Cherokee Gives Back

Buy items for trip (clothing, travel necessities, etc)

Mail thank you cards


I just wanted to let everyone know that so far enough money had come in for me to pay for my entire plane ticket and traveler's insurance so thank you! God has been blessing me so much through all of you and it's amazing to see Him work.

On my way!

I have officially booked my plane ticket to Ethiopia!!!!!

I leave Raleigh May 30th and fly back into Raleigh on June 3o.

Thank you so much to Mrs. Freeland from Gulliver's Travels for helping my book my tickets!

Yikes....now I need to get vaccinations, travelers insurance, register my trip, and my stuff to pack! Only about 3 months to go before I leave!

Update

Hello friends!
I just wanted to give everyone an update on how much trip planning is going.

I received a phone call from Kim Shaw, the Program Coordinator for Cherokee Gives Back the other day. She wanted to make sure I was still planning on volunteering this summer and how preparations were going. I told her how awesome fund raising was going so far (thanks guys!) and that I had about half of the money I needed and we talked about buying my plane tickets sometime soon. I'm talking to one of my family's friends right now, who is a travel agent, about the plane tickets.

Also, I got the name of a couple who works for Cherokee down in Ethiopia from Mrs. Mestas and emailed them about my trip. I told them about myself and how I wanted to work in the orphanages while I was there along with take photographs. Here is a copy of the email I got back.

Hey Sarah,

Great to hear from you. It will not be a problem to place you at an orphanage, as we have many partners in that area - especially in the summer when the kids aren't at school.

One strong possibility is Hanna Orphanage - quite an outstanding place and superb model. Hanna cares for around 175 kids (not all of them in Addis, however) and divides these kids, once old enough (high school level) into families of 6 or 7 and places them in homes of their own in the surrounding community. The kids learn independence but also responsibility and what it's like to live in a family atmosphere. It's hard for me to describe just how effective this method is, but it is certainly impressive and the kids are awesome.

Glad to hear you're into photography as well - I play around with it a little, but certainly am an amateur; maybe you can teach me a thing or two. I keep a blog and post some pics at www.lamppostreports.wordpress.com, if you're interested.

Look forward to seeing you this summer.

Best,
JT

Well I think that's all for now :-)

Travel Dates!

I've gotten my travel dates!

I will be going to Ethiopia June 1 - June 30!

I am sooooo excited!!!!

Thank you!

Still no word on what the dates will be for my trip.

I want to say a big thank you though to everyone who has been so generous in supporting me thus far. THANK YOU! I feel so blessed knowing that you want to help. It really means a lot to me.

And in case you are not keeping up with the fundraising thermometer on the right side of the page (or I forget to update it) so far I have raised $850! Yay!! This is a good start :-)

Fundraising letters

I mailed out fundraising letters for my trip to Ethiopia the other day so I thought I'd post a copy of the letter on here too.

January 1, 2009

Dear Friend ,

I have been blessed with an amazing opportunity to travel to Ethiopia for a month this summer to volunteer in orphanages in Addis Ababa. To make this possible, I need to raise over $3000 to pay for my plane ticket, transportation, food, and other necessities. I believe God is calling me to this work, so I believe He will also provide a way to raise the funds I need over the coming months.

There are 4.6 million orphans living in Ethiopia due to AIDS, starvation, malaria, and other causes. I want to volunteer in the Ethiopian orphanages to both serve the dedicated workers who care for these children, and also to show love and compassion to the orphans, sharing with them the love I have received from God, my family and my friends. I believe every child should know they are loved and wanted and I hope to be able to show them that.

I will be traveling under the organization Cherokee Gives Back, the philanthropic outreach program of the investment firm Cherokee, which works to improve the lives of individuals and communities from around the world through a variety of social, environmental and economic development initiatives. Cherokee Gives Back owns and operates a house located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where I will be staying during my visit. They will connect me with various orphanages in Addis Ababa where I will serve in any way that is needed. To find out more about Cherokee Gives Back, check out their website at http://www.cherokeegivesback.org

Along with working in the orphanages, I plan on utilizing my photography skills to photograph and document the people and places that I encounter in Ethiopia. This will help raise awareness for the organizations I will be working with, provide images for Cherokee Gives Back to use in promoting their program, and also will allow me to share with others my experience and hopefully encourage more people to take an interest in caring for the orphans of Ethiopia and the world.

I first became interested in serving Ethiopian orphans after our friends, the Mestas family, traveled to Ethiopia in 2007 to bring home their three beautiful children. While they were staying in Addis Ababa, they visited various different orphanages and met many of the children who lived there. When the Mestases returned home, they brought many stories of how little the children had, yet how joyful and loving they still were. Hearing these stories made me want to go to Ethiopia myself and meet these children and help them in any way that I could.

There are a few different ways that you can help support me:

First, you can help support me through your prayers. I will be traveling by myself to a third world country and will be immersed in a very unfamiliar culture. This will be the longest I have spent out of the country and away from anything familiar. As I go on this adventure I can’t think of anything better than having an army of friends and family back home praying for me.

Second, you can help provide financial support for my living and travel expenses as I serve in Ethiopia. As a college student, I do not have a lot of money and traveling abroad is expensive. In order to go, I will need to raise the money to pay for the trip. Here is a reak down of my estimated costs to travel to Ethiopia:

Flight: $2,000

Vaccinations: $300

Travel Medical Insurance: $250

Visa (<>

Room and Board $100/week

Tip for Ethiopian Staff $10/week

Meals, Taxis etc… $20/week

TOTAL $3090

If you wish to help financially support me as I serve the orphans in Ethiopia, please make checks payable to me and mail them in the self-addressed envelope included.

Third, you can help support me by donating money to the organizations I will be serving with. As a volunteer with Cherokee Gives Back, I am required to raise $500 to support efforts in Ethiopia. This money will help defray program expenses and help support the poor. Donations made to support Cherokee Gives Back’s Ethiopia Program are also tax-deductible [Tax ID 27-0132571]. If you wish to donate money to the Ethiopia Program, please make checks payable to Cherokee Gives Back and indicate in the memo section Ethiopia Program and mail them to me in the self-addressed envelope included.

To document my journey and to keep everyone who whishes informed and updated, I have started a blog, www.sherbert-footsteps.blogspot.com where I will be posting updates on my trip and my preparations, along with other information.

I know most people do not have the time or the means to go and serve in another country themselves, but by supporting me you are helping in another country because without your support, my trip to Ethiopia would not be possible. Thank you so much for your help and for caring about helping the orphans in Ethiopia.

Sincerely,

Sarah Herbert

I joined Mocha Club today and I would love it if you joined my team.
http://mochaclub.org/joinme/footsteps

Friend's adoption

So I am up in MA right now with my family for Christmas and there is about a foot of snow on the ground. Yay for a white Christmas. :-)

This past week I went with my mom and sister, along with a bunch of our friends to the airport to meet our friends, the Craigs, who were flying home from getting their two new children from Ethiopia. They adopted a 6 year old girl named Amberlynn and a 3 year old boy named Amon. The children were precious and the family was so glad to be home and reunited.

Amberlynn

Amberlynn and her new big sister Morgan.

Mrs. Craig and her new son Amon

There was a pretty big crowd of people waiting for them when they got off the airplane most of them little kids.

The group gathering after hearing their plane had landed.

James, Jared, Jeremiah, and Josiah

Keziah playing with her balloon animal while we waited.

Still no news on when I'm going to Ethiopia but I'll let you know.