Busy end of summer week!

This week has been quite eventful!
Friday, 24th September, my mother and I went to Amsterdam. I wasn't used to waking up so early anymore,but we had some time to rest in a two hour train ride. In October my mother is organising a party to celebrate her promotion. The goal of this trip was to put all the invitations and present tips (this would be a donation to my project) in an envelope and stick it. She brought me to one of the offices of the university , where students aren't allowed to come, to do the job. There were 500 invitations so this was quite a dull thing to do! And after we were told that the glue on envelopes is made of horse bones we decided to stick to sellotape. After two hours of this mindless work we were finished and we celebrated this by making a little trip to Albert Kuijp, a big street market in Amsterdam. I bought an exclusive poncho and two wonderful dresses. It was a great day!

The following day the journalist I had contacted a couple of weeks ago (thanks to our mayor Marino Keulen) came and asked me a couple of questions and made some pictures. This will be published on September the 1st in our local newspaper. He was a lovely, funny old man who was very impressed with my project and loves to interview young people, because according to him, that keeps him young too.

In the evening there was a barbecue in our village. We thought we could take this opportunity to do something for my project and my mother and I decided it would be a good idea to sing.
Because it is quite hard to drag my piano with me to the other side of the village, I decided to teach myself guitar in one week. This ended up to be a very hard thing to do. My fingers are so tiny I really need a lot more practice than one week to learn how to play so I ended up playing one of the simplest songs on guitar ever

It's simple, but it is rather nice.

We arrived at around 6.30 a.m. at the barbecue, but there was hardly anyone there yet.
I was already getting a bit nervous, because the tent didn't look very suitable to sing in and reach all the people around me (there were about 70 guests). Around 8 o'clock the people started streaming in and at 10 most people were already a bit tipsy. I was afraid I would interrupt the atmosphere with my playing so I asked Jos, a local who plays folky music with his accordeon, to do a song first. He got a lot of people to sing along and when he finished he introduced me. Inside I was dying of nerves, but I did a small briefing about my project and sang the song. When I finished jos ostentatiously took off his hat and put 20 euros in it and then went round with it. I sold some of my home-made broches and did some more explaining about my project. In the end I collected about 200 euros in 10 minutes.

For the rest of the week I have been contacted by some service clubs. I have to prepare a talk to explain my project thuroughly, but they all promised me there would definitely be a donation.

In my free time I have been to my aunt in Dordrecht (she gave me a big donation) and yesterday I went to the zoo in Planckendael! A great way to round off the last week of summer.

Busy busy busy

The last two weeks of July I worked at a play scheme for children in Lanaken. This is for children who need supervision throughout the day while their parents are out at work. I was responsible for the creative activities and supervised children between the age of 7 and 12. We do several kind of activities, but what I enjoyed the most was making the 'hippie' T-shirts with the children. We dyed white T-shirts into textile paint after making patterns with elastic bands on it.

This is sort of the idea, but it looked far less professional when we made it (though much nicer if I can be honest). The children loved doing this and that made it all the more enjoyable for me.
I loved doing the play scheme, but it's very time- consuming.

So at the beginning of August I really had to start putting all my energy into the fundraising. It's hard, I still have trouble with asking people money and I really have to get over my shyness.
I have received a lot of generous donations from friends, family and companies in the village. My grandfather did a proof reading job, and donated the money which he earned with that to my project. All my donors get a broche of a sunflower made out of felt which me and my mum made.

This is picture of me making them.

Last week Sunday, the 12th, we organised a baking sale. On the Saturday we went to the farmers' market in Eisden bought all the ingredients and the same day we made home-made lemonade and I started baking chocolate and blueberry muffins.
On Sunday I put everything ready at 10 o'clock in the morning. We hung up two banners saying BAKE 4 MALAWI, put a nice vase of sunflowers on the table and displayed the biscuits and muffins etc.
It was a very sunny and busy in the village so we were very very lucky! We soundtracked the whole event with Paul Simon's Graceland, Miriam Makeba and Vampire Weekend to get people in an African mood.
I had a couple of friends who helped me out, and when Sarah got out the waffle iron and started baking fresh   waffels and once one of our clients tasted the gingerbreadmen my mother made and called out OH MY GOD THIS IS DELICIOUS the customers came in loads.

From left to right: Sarah, Judith and me

After a long and hot day I treated my friends to a drink and we counted the money. We collected 280,93 euros, which was far more than I expected and that means that we made a profit of more than 200 euros.
We will probably do this again this weekend, but we have learnt to not start at 10, but preferably at 12, and to get a large parasol to avoid sunstrokes in case of warm weather.