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September, 2001 | |
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Dear Sponsors, I wanted to send you a bit of an update now since it's been a while since my last one. But I'll have a lot more news for you in October. I'll be gone September 11 - 30 on a trip to China to visit some of the orphanages we've been sponsoring! Our tentative schedule includes a visit to the following orphanages: Nanchang, Guixi, Yingtan, Yujiang, Shangrao, Yichun, Xinyu, Leping, Fuzhou (Linchuan) and Ganzhou. And Dr. Hong and Ms. Qiu are in Jiangxi province right now. Their quarterly visit was a little late due to some other projects and reports that needed their attention in the Nanjing office. So I'll also have the news from their report to share with you. Feel free to pass this update on to any others that might be interested. Most of this update will deal with details of our school sponsorship program for the 2001-2002 school year. At least 43 new schoolchild sponsors will be needed so even if you haven't been involved in this project in the past I'd encourage you to read about it below. But first some other news. Foster Care Our recent expansion of our foster care program has focused on older children with special needs, most recently at the Yingtan and Nanchang orphanages. More details and photos are in the Current Projects section of this web site. We've received half year reports on most of our foster children (except the Guixi ones) and are in the process of getting those out to sponsors. A few make take a little longer since we're waiting for some additional information from Amity. We have a few children still in need of a sponsor so let me know if you might be interested. Hugging Grannies The Xinyu orphanage did finally find two Grandmas and they've started working with the children. These brings us up to a total of 25 Grannies giving extra love and attention to the children in the orphanages. We have photos of a number of them on the website. These hardworking women can make a huge difference in the lives of the children and care deeply about them. I hope to get more photos of them at work and learn more about the individual Grannies and their thoughts about working with the children while I'm there. Medical Projects We've been able to provide for several surgeries and there's been a request for some additional ones. You can see these children at the website. We paid for open heart surgery for one of our primary school students and now will be working to provide open heart surgery for many more children with congenital heart disease. Schoolchildren - New School Tuition Sponsors Will Be Needed! I know many of you that have been sponsoring a schoolchild are wondering when you will hear from me about the upcoming school year. The Amity staff have been very busy getting the half yearly foster care reports and the end of the year school reports translated. They also have some conferences they're preparing such as one for orphanage staff about foster care. And Dr. Hong and Ms. Qiu are currently in Jiangxi visiting the orphanages so are not available in the Amity office to work on this. So we are behind schedule for getting this project organized for the start of the school year. I don't have a list of the names of the children who we'll be sponsoring this year yet but I do know that we'll increase from the 123 children that we had at the end spring semester to 166 children starting school this fall! So I hope most of you will decide to continue your current sponsorship and that there will be some more of you that would like to begin sponsoring a child. And if your schoolchild was adopted during the past school year I'd love to have you sponsor one of these new children. The costs vary depending on what level of school the child is in, from $78 for primary school to $155 for kindergarten and high school. But what I'd like to do this year is average the costs for all the children (except the two in university which costs quite a bit more) and have all school sponsors pay the same amount which would be $118. If you are already sponsoring a child in primary school and can't afford this increase let me know and I can supplement with general funds. By having all sponsors pay the same amount we can get started collecting the donations for the children. And it will greatly simplify our record-keeping and assignments of sponsors to children. If you sponsored a child last year and know that you want to sponsor a child again this year (either the same child if they're still in school or a different child if they've been adopted or dropped out for other reasons) go ahead and send your $118 donation made out to Altrusa Foundation (tax deductible) to me at: Altrusa Foundation If you only want to continue sponsorship if you previous child is still in school make a note of that on the memo line of your check and I won't deposit it until we have the final list from Amity. Peggy Gurrad will be coordinating the School Sponsorship program so please e-mail her at peggy@gurrad.com and let her know if you will be continuing your sponsorship or not. Feel free to e-mail her with other questions about school sponsorships as well. I'm trying to get all the information to her that she needs but please be patient with the two of us if she e-mails you to ask about something you think she should already know about. And for the most part your updates, letters and photos should still be coming to you from the people that were helping me with this last year. To learn a little about Peggy you can go to the "About Altrusa" page at the website (www.altrusa.ws) and look under "Meet Our Volunteers". Please send your donations as soon as possible. Then I can get them recorded before I leave for China on September 11 and let Andrea know that your donation has arrived. She can then be working on this project while I'm gone. New school sponsors should also send their donation to me at the address above and can e-mail Andrea to let her know that your support is on it's way. If you have preferences as to age or sex of the child or the orphanage the child is from you can include that in your e-mail to Andrea as she'll be making the assignments. But we can't guarantee that we can meet all requests. If you don't have a strong preference then it would be easiest for Andrea to just place you where most needed. If you ONLY want to sponsor a child from a certain orphanage put that on the memo line of your check and I won't deposit until we know for sure if we can grant your request. Please note if you only want the donation used for schoolchildren or if it could be used for Hugging Grannies instead if we happen to get more sponsors than we need. You could write "Schoolchild/Granny" or "Only Schoolchild" on the memo line. I'll hold off on depositing the "Only Schoolchild" donations. I just received the end of the school year reports in the mail today so it will be a bit before we can get those out to you. If you're continuing on with your sponsorship we'll send you everything. If you sponsored last year but can't continue this year we'll send you the school report and any letters or drawings from the child. We'll also send a copy of the info sheet with photo but will need to send the original copy of the photo to the new sponsor. New sponsors will get an info sheet and photo of the child they'll be sponsoring and if they were sponsored by us last year we'll send you a copy of the school report. If the child is new to our sponsorship program we'll send you the info sheet and photo but it may take a couple months to get all of these sent from the orphanages, translated by Amity, and mailed to us and then to you. We may not get mid year school reports and photos this year since Amity just isn't able to do this with the small staff they have (to keep their administrative costs low) but we will continue to get the end of the year reports and photos. You can write to your schoolchild by sending letters (with photos and small gifts if desired) directly to the orphanage. You probably won't get an acknowledgement back but as far as I can tell the children do receive these letters and gifts and are thrilled with them. Here's a message from one of our schoolchild sponsors who was able to visit the orphanage where she is sponsoring a child (the orphanage her older daughter was adopted from) while in China to adopt another child: "The girls and I tore off to Fuzhou (Linchuan) to visit with Meiya's foster mom. We met with Director Zhou and were given a tour of the orphanage. We were able to meet in person with the young girl we sponsor (via Peggy Gurrad and Altrusa foundation) for tuition. What a doll. She came to Mr. Zhou's office to meet us carrying a bag with the letter, diary, photo and gel pen I sent to her last year. Talk about tearing your heart out. I would strongly suggest that if any of you are sponsoring a child you take the opportunity to correspond with them...it obviously means a lot to these kids!" I'll try to find a way to encourage the children to write back directly to their sponsors when I visit next month. I think most sponsors could find someone to translate a letter written in Chinese if their schoolchild were to send one to them. That's it for news right now. I'm quite excited about my upcoming trip with Amity and look forward to being able to share lot's of photos and information with you. By the way, this trip is financed with my own money. I'm not using any donated money for any of my expenses. We send 100% of your donation on to Amity or, in the case of a few new projects, to the responsible organization. With much appreciation for all your support,
Peggy Gurrad
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