DECEMBER 1
Our December workday is this Saturday, the 1st. We've got lots to sew and serge, as well as many non-sewing tasks such as pressing, folding, cutting, pinning, etc. If you bring your machine, please remember little things like power cord, bobbins, needles, seam ripper, thread snips, etc.
I hope you can join us! As usual, we'll meet at Our Sewing Room at 5th and Main in Springfield. What's not "usual" this month is that Springfield's Christmas Parade will come down Main Street in the afternoon. It starts many blocks away (28th and Olympic) at 1:00 pm and won't hit our corner for probably a couple of hours after that, but please be aware that it may affect driving and parking near OSR. It's fun to be inside and warm and see the paraders going by. The bank lot WILL be available, but probably will fill up fast.
GIVING TUESDAY
I find all of these "special" end-of-November days kind of, well, special . . . Thanksgiving, Black Friday (and in some stores, that includes Wednesday), Small Business Saturday, CyberMonday, Giving Tuesday. Did I forget anything?
If you'd like to make a Giving Tuesday donation to support Days for Girls, you have options! A donation to our chapter helps us help others. We send kits to Third World countries (300 went out this month), but we also help local DFG Enterprises in those countries by providing them with supplies, transported by traveling friends and friends/relatives of friends. This year we've helped Enterprises and local teams in Kenya (twice) and Peru, and in January, we're sending two suitcases full of fabric and other supplies to a brand new Enterprise in Ecuador.
Or, you can donate to our headquarters, and they'll also use the funds to assist Enterprises. Here's an email from DFG founder Celeste Mergens:
Tomorrow, help bring health, dignity and opportunity to all by supporting Days for Girls Enterprises. This Giving Tuesday, give the gift of opportunity by supporting the growth of Days for Girls Enterprises. Our Enterprise program empowers local leaders to make and sell DfG pads and deliver health education, giving her what she needs to stay in school, while supporting local women-led businesses.
We're also excited to announce that the Vidovich Family has stepped up to match the first $25,000 in donations to Days for Girls International (matching funds go to DFGI). That means that your gift goes twice as far.
Opportunity and empowerment for her starts with YOU.
Best of both worlds . . . make a donation online to our chapter (see link below) and if it's within the first $25,000 donated, we get your funds to use for kits, or supplies for Enterprises, and headquarters gets the matching funds to assist Enterprises.
CUSTOM LINK
If you make a monetary donation to our Eugene/Springfield Chapter, you can always hand or send me a check. If you'd like an official receipt for tax purposes, please make the check out to Days for Girls and in the memo line, write Eugene Chapter. If you don't need the official receipt, a check made out to Susan Mondon works too, and goes directly into our account, without first being sent to Bellingham.
Donating online is also a route to get funds to us, although there are fees deducted from the contribution before it gets to us, so we only receive about 95% of the money. But if that's easiest for you, please use this custom link:
https://donate.daysforgirls.
Using the link will automatically direct donations to our Eugene/Springfield chapter.
THOUSANDS OF KITS TO KENYA
Huldah, a Kenya native living in San Diego now, is heading back to visit Kenya in January with her husband and baby daughter. She took and distributed 1500 kits on a previous trip. This year, she requested 5000 kits. She had a great response, relying heavily on Oregon, Arizona and California teams and chapters. Because mailing those kits is pretty darn expensive, she and her husband took a quick trip as far north as Eugene, stopping along the way (coming up and heading back) to pick up kits many other teams and chapters had also readied for her. Our chapter contributed 300 kits. Bringing together components to assemble that many kits meant a lot of empty boxes and tubs!
Thanks to those of you who were able to come in one or two extra days to put those kits together.
I loaded them in my van and left them there, not knowing at that point what Huldah's schedule was and whether we would met up at our Springfield rooms or at my house.
But, she kept in touch, and she and her husband arrived at my house in Eugene at about 9:30 one cold night a couple of weeks ago. I turned flood lights on my driveway so we had a little bit of light. As we unloaded the bags of our kits packed by underwear size, they transferred the kits to bigger vacuum seal bags, also marked by size. Very organized, they brought not only the bags, but also a vacuum, and extension cord! As always, it was magical to see those bags shrink down to less than half their original size. They would not have fit otherwise, and there were several hundred more to pick up after Eugene!
Those kits will soon be in Kenya changing the lives of thousands of girls! Thank you all for the work and donations you contributed to make wonderful distributions like this happen!
Huldah also sends her thanks:
As we all look forward to Thanksgiving and the start of a hectic Holiday season, my family and I want to say THANK YOU! Thank you to the leaders of each team that rallied their group to participate in this 5,000 kit request headed to Kenya. Thank you for the time, efforts and resources that it took to put together the number of kits you all did as a team. Thank you to those who were able to work with our travel schedule as we drove from San Diego to as far north as Eugene, OR on the weekend of Nov. 10 and 11 and also to the Arizona teams who were so gracious enough to drop off their kits at one location making is soo much easier for my husband to make a one day trip out to Mesa, AZ. Thank to the teams who have and will within the next couple of weeks mail their kits to us. Lastly thank you to the teams that had kits ready for us but for one reason or another, we weren't able to reach you to collect them. Some of those team we are still working on transportation options and hopefully by mid December we would have a solution.
To date, we have collected 3,620 kits THANKS TO ALL OF YOU!
My family and I will keep you all updated on our trip and will have tons of pics and videos of testimony to share from the girls and mothers once we return from Kenya. In the meantime enjoy some of the pictures from our two trips and the wonderful ladies we met along the way.
In conclusion, from my family thank you all for your hard work! Together, we will reach EVERY GIRL, EVERYWHERE, PERIOD!
WASHCLOTHS
After putting together the 300 kits for Kenyan girls and women, I think what we are lowest on now is washcloths. Target had Room Essentials 6-packs on sale last week, today they're 15% off for CyberMonday, and your guess is as good as mine about upcoming sales. They're a good weight for our kits, and of course, the darker the color, the better. Unfortunately, they're not currently selling the navy ones in 6-packs, but the grey or aqua are a good second choice. Please avoid the Walmart 18-packs and other very thin ones. They are poorly made and fall apart! We also don't use the thicker, plusher ones as they won't dry completely in humid climates.
OUR NEW ROOMS
Many of you got a sneak preview, a "before" glimpse of the rooms at the back of the Our Sewing Room building that we'll be using for storage and additional work. So, how're they coming along? Slooooowly, to put it mildly. Walls have been patched and have fresh coats of paint,
but we have run into a few snags . . . .
Old buildings do have issues. So, as I said, progress is slow!
DEHUMIDIFIER?
Patty loaned us her dehumidifier. We could use another one for the 2nd room. Too bad I sold mine when we had a garage sale fundraiser for our chapter! Please let me know if you have one you're not using that you could loan/give us!
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