Starting the fundraising

Now my finals for secundary school are over and having had a week's holiday in Spain, I am starting fundraising in earnest. In fact, while I was away in Spain, already a couple of important things happened. The folder about my project, which I've been working on for some time, was printed. The printer gave me a donation by cutting the price by 20%.

This is the front picture of my brochure.

My first donation already came several months ago from my aunt Clea. She paid my registration costs, which I had to pay to Project Trust to register myself as a volunteer. Because we don't have cheques in Belgium, my mother had to ask Clea whether she would write the cheque to Project Trust for us. Clea wrote the cheque and my mother paid a 100 pounds into my fund. She would after all have paid for the registration.
Then there was the carwash. It was an exercise for economics which we had planned to do with our class.

We already had the idea of the carwash back in September 2011, but then the idea was that we, the school carwashers, would share the profits between us. When I found out I was going to Malawi I asked my friends if they would agree to give all the proceeds to my project. They did. Sorry no photo's of that event, it was freezing cold that day and it rained most of the time. We arranged for the carwash to be after the Easter holiday, because we thought it would be warmer then, but it was actually much colder in April than in March.

With the pupils' council it has been agreed that I will give a presentation of my project in October or November 2012 to all classes in the school. I'm going to give a different presentation to each grade. The sixth years might be more interested in my role as a volunteer, whereas the first years will probably identify quite strongly with the children in the orphanage. After my presentation in each grade I'm going to ask everybody to give a donation of 1 euro. That could come up to 500 euros.

Today I biked through the pouring rain and back to the library in Maastricht (that's 10 km each way) and spent a couple of hours peering in a book with names and addresses of grant-giving bodies. It's a long list, but many are not suitable for my project, many don't give funds to individuals, or they're related to very specific locations. Anyway, I did find a couple and I've written my first fundraising letter.