Africa

Gwen left this morning for Kenya,  carrying kits made by four Oregon teams.  I'm so appreciative of the leaders of the other teams in our state being willing to add their kits to this batch.  The Newport Rotary group representatives are joining Gwen in Kenya, and took 50 of our kits, and made 25 of their own.  Gwen took 175 made by our team, Central Oregon, Medford and Portland, plus some spare parts.  What a wonderful statewide effort!  Two hundred fifty girls are about to receive life-changing gifts!  Thank you all for your part in this.

Now, I thought, we can start building up a stash of kits.  But just a few days later, Maggie learned of a friend going to Zimbabwe August 13, who is willing to take 50 kits for the orphanage/school we donated (65 kits) to a few months ago.  I think we can do this!  We got a lot of finished components turned in on our last work day, and a batch of shields is being completed as I write.

I haven't counted how many different bags we have yet, but I have some here that I'll be adding the drawstrings to, and others were brought in or sent to us recently.  I like to have as much variety as possible in the bag fabrics (no duplicates in a distribution would be ideal).  Since these kits are of such a personal nature, it would be nice if they had little chance of getting mixed up.   If you make bags, making several of the same fabric is fine--I just don't put them all in the same distribution.  So, if you're working on bags, and have any ready to have drawstrings inserted, please let me know when and where I can get them from you.

At our July 19th workday, we mostly focused on  the flannel liners.  We have such an efficient crew, and the making of liners, while pretty simple, gets divided into many "assembly line" steps:   Washing, drying, pressing the flannel material, cutting into 9" and 6" strips, serging the 6" strips down to 5.5", pressing/pinning the 5.5" strips (wrong sides together) down the center of the 9" strips, sewing them down,

cutting these sewn strips into 9" squares,

serging all around the edges (resulting in 8.5" squares), and securing the serged thread ends.

Joyce was one of several who sewed at home this month--she brought in a huge batch of liners she made at home (plus lots of bags) to add to our day's total.

Wow!  What a great group! You're such a joy to work with!

Our inventory of underwear is very low.  This batch of kits going to Zimbabwe will use 100 pair.  We need mostly girls' sizes 10 and 12, and a few 14s.  Feedback is that cotton briefs work best, so that's what we are buying and requesting.  Underwear fabrics to avoid are prints containing people/animals/insects (butterflies are OK), words, "glam", weapons, and anything culturally specific or religious. Happily, stores are starting their back-to-school sales, bringing the price well below a dollar a pair.  Walmart has 12-packs of girls Fruit of the Loom briefs for $6.79 (57¢ each), although they're currently out of stock online.  Target has  9-packs of Hanes briefs for $6.49 (72¢ each).  They often have several whites in a package, but Laura does a lovely job of dying them for us.  These prices apparently are the same online or in the stores.

FLASH UPDATE:  Sunday, August 2:   Target has Fruit of the Loom 12-packs (9 plus 3 bonus) for $6.00.  In today's paper there's a $5. off 3 Fruit of the Loom items that you can use to buy, bringing the price down to $.36 per pair!   If you don't get the paper, you can get the coupon on your mobile device by texting FRUIT to 827438.
This is the best price I've seen in 2+ years.  This is a great time to really stock up for our future distributions!
Remember--briefs are the best for us, and be mindful of the prints (listed above) that we can't use.  Bright colors are wonderful.

Our next work day is August 19th. Hope to see you there!