hi everyone! i haven't done much blogging in a while, but i'm going to do share a few stories before coming home!! for the holidays.
Life at school has been incredible. I am stretched in every direction. Every event you can imagine, I have chaperoned it. So many students have I tutored! and so on...
Most of all, I got myself a little too involved in a charity project here. Tia Cris wrote to me, that it is often the projects you get quickly excited about and don't think through all the way that take over your life and energy and don't always produce maximum results: YES. This has been an exercise, a good karma generator that just won't die.
It began with an innocent suggestion that we make postcards of my photos and sell them here in the lead-up to the holidays. However, after paying significant money for less than mediocre print quality it was decided that the prints we bought were too poorly-done to sell. People sadly agreed that they wouldn't have any use for them as they were. So how to re-coop the loss?
And so came the idea to mount the prints on pieces of tag board, and then to do traditional wood-block stamping over top for an authentic Bangladeshi twist. The plan was to make as many "postcards" as we could and sell them at the school Christmas bazar.
And so! With the help of multiple art teachers and about 15 8th grade girls in a huge production line we produced more than 200 cards. On the day of the bazar we were set to sell them. We also ran a make-your-own card booth for the kids. Oh yeah - we charged a high price! A dollar fifty for each one! Trying to make back the money we'd already spent up-front on all the supplies.
Things were not going so well. People meandered by our booth, then looked around at the million other trinkets they could buy - maybe they picked up a postcard or two, but our stack was not going down at any kind of speed.
Thank goodness, a woman came by in the mid-afternoon and was taken by the beauty (haha!) of our strange creation. She bought 100 cards to use as a company Christmas greeting mailer. Ch-ching baby. Then, our superintendent came by and checked out this excellent example of a middle school effort in service learning and Bangladeshi culture - he also asked for 100 cards to take on his recruiting trips this spring! Sold!
And so we recovered our costs, and made about $200 more. Whew, I thought we were sunk - that we came out in the black is a small miracle.
On top of this, the calendar has already made over $200 for the FFC charity -
Oh guys, I'm happy to have had so much support and goodwill toward Bangladesh and these efforts. I now can say that, through the generosity of friends, I'll get to donate about $400 to the FFC orphanage this Christmas. Thank you.
In the next few days, I'll write about Eid-ul-Azha. That's a Muslim holiday spanning 3 days. It takes place this week and it involves the slaughtering of cows, in order to give meat to the poor. Thousands of cows have been shipped into Dhaka in the last week, and every wealthy family kills a cow - everywhere. This will be interesting. I'm going to get out my camera again, which has had several weeks of rest.
I'm also going to write about the Bangladesh political situation, something I have been wanting to tell about for a while. Presidential elections happen while we are gone for Christmas break.... they are the first presidential elections since the military seized power and declared a state of emergency several years ago. In fact, John McCain and Joe Lieberman came here last Tuesday, to Dhaka, for a 10 hour visit on their Asia tour - encouraging a message of free and fair and safe elections... we'll see. The political protest scene happening here now is fascinating and intimidating...
