THANK YOU

I wish to thank everyone who has donated their time, money and handcrafted cups to this project.
I am overwhelmed by the generous response we have received.
I especially wish to thank Pam Herring, Sue Schmidt and Sharon Speedy and her daughters for running the Cups for Water project in Breckenridge this summer. They worked hard to raise alot of money and gave out much information for the project.
Thank you to the members of the Summit County Clay Artists for their generous donations of cups.
I also wish to thank the high school students and the Girl Scouts who participated in making cups and generating sales.
And a huge thank you to all who have purchased our cups and made donations to this project.
A special thank you as well, to the Vail Farmer's Market & Art Show for allowing me to present this project in my booth.
Donna

Summer Markets Over - Time to Blog

Hello clay friends. 
This summer found me extra busy taking on the Aspen Saturday Market in addition to the Vail Farmer's Market & Art Show.  So I do appologize for not updating this blog.  Thank you all for checking in on our project's progress.
Here's our great news!  We have raised $1059 for the purchase of water filters.  That comes out to approximately 30 filters.
Tina & Wantay are still in Tanzania and putting a program in place to distribute the filters among the Maasai villagers.
I am including an excerpt from her latest email here:

Tina:
We were all day yesterday fetching water for the boma as they have been out of water for 3 weeks as the storage tank developed a crack and the NCAA was slow to repair it.  I told Wantay that I’d like to go see the water filter in use and he responded “Do you think there is water in it?”  Duh, not when there’s been no water at the village tap for 3 weeks. But, my mother-in-law was still happy with the way it performed.  Yea!
   All the money you guys have so generously raised will go to purchasing as many filters as possible, to the cost of transporting them from the Arusha factory to Ngorongoro and to purchasing packaging materials, if needed.  Wantay and I do not take any salary and we are in fact terrible about even reimbursing our out-of-pocket expenses, so most of the time we end up paying for things like gas, accommodation etc. while doing Aid Tanzania stuff.  Please have some patience with us as things are not as simple as in the US.  For instance, because we’ve been in the Conservation area for 4 days on 4x4 roads, we’ll need to take the car to the mechanic to have him look it over and tighten things up before going to Arusha to pick up the filters. We’ll have to have the seats removed from the car (it’s a 1994 Land Rover) which is about an hour long process to have someone crawl under the car and unbolt the seats from the chasis…So we will want to be 100% certain that the factory has all the filters produced, tested, and packaged before we make the 3 & ½ hour drive to pick them up, return home and then drive the 1.5-2 hours into the Conservation area to distribute them.  We’ll also want to have someone from Safe Water come and conduct the training to the 30+ recipients.  So, it may take us a little while to coordinate everyone’s schedule.  Did I ever send you the photos from our visit to the “factory”?  It’s not a factory as we would think of it with automated processes or even multiple people working on a “line”, but rather it seems that one fellow is producing the filters.  They are gaining in popularity as three other of our friends are purchasing filters as gifts for locals they know.
We had hoped to get a plan in place while we were there this week for distributing the filters but the water situation was so dire that we had to use our car to take as many buckets as we could to town to purchase water for people (again out of our own pockets).  The people are REALLY suffering right now as it is the dry season and the cows have no milk so the people really have no nourishment. 

Tina's note kinda puts things in perspective.

Respectfully submitted,

Donna