Upcoming Fundraiser: April 6, 2010, 10:00am-4:00pm, Bluegrass Community and Technical College, Oswald Building Lobby

Our theme for this spring's fundraiser will be "Kitchen and Garden: Growing for fun and food." Items will include an assortment of cookbooks, flower pots, seeds, and of course, lots of baked goods. We also have many items left from our fall sale, including jewelry, prints, clothing, and decorations from China, Indonesia, Korea, and Africa. We hope to see you there!

Our three-year goal is to raise money to buy solar panels for both the primary and secondary schools in Okela. But we have a specific goal this spring: to begin a scholarship to send one female from Okela village to a three-year nursing school. Our hope is to raise enough money for the first year of study. We feel that once the basic needs of the children are met, helping them further their education is the best hope to fight poverty and disease and improve their lives.

New classroom update

Thanks to past and ongoing donations to the Okela School Charities, Inc., we are pleased to report that $5000 has been sent to Okela during the past two years for the building of a new classroom. The classroom has been completed, and another $1000 was delivered in the summer of 2008 for desks and materials. Ten boxes of textbooks and four boxes of science equipment have also been sent. A generator ($1000) was recently purchased so that science equipment requiring electricity can be used. (There is no electricity in the Okela Village.) The next phase of the project will be to raise additional money to equip the new classroom as an early childhood education center.

There is lack of clean water in Okela village. Above a woman is fetching dirty water at a local pond. These ponds dry up during the dry season forcing the villagers to walk 10 km to the lake (Lake Victoria).

The purpose of our current project is to make clean water available and easily accessible for the over 650 students at Okela Primary and Secondary School. The water project was completed in early summer 2009. The new water system consists of huge plastic bins permanently installed beside each school to collect and purify water during the rainy seasons.

The female children will no longer have to walk 10 kilometers to get water, and children will no longer be drinking contaminated water.

We have been able to raise nearly $5,000 to install the water systems. Thank you for providing life giving water to the people of the Okela Village. If you would like to give further assistance, the people of the Okela Village will be very grateful.