Tuesday, September 30, 2008

New drop-off point!

Patuxent Presbyterian Church on Rt 4, just south of the Solomon's Island Bridge

Calvert County residents, I'm looking at you!

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Locations Locations Locations

Wanna donate blankets or winter clothes to our project? If it's not October 13th yet, then grab the keys to the nearest vehicle, or your STS bus pass, and head on over to one of these locations. Please note that only students and their families can use the schools as drop points...

Pro Fitness Gym -- Wildewood Shopping Center
Shoppers Food Warehouse -- San Souci Plaza
Great Mills High School
Leonardtown High School
Esperanza Middle School
Spring Ridge Middle School
Hollywood Elementary School


Also a reminder, financial donations are gladly accepted and will be either extremely or desperately needed, depending on how many blankets we end up with. Click on the Paypal Donate button on the top-right side of this blog, or send a check to the address I gave you in the last post.

And check this out:

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Boxing Day

We've got some new information about the project...

Timeline
Boxes will be out from Monday September 22nd to Monday October 13th; fundraising for the shipping costs will continue until all necessary funds have been accrued.

Locations
Next post, I promise! We're still securing all our donation drop-off points, and I want to make sure we get as many as possible.

Financial Donations
Sending boxes to Georgia via USPS costs $21 plus approximately $4 per pound, so for example, a 20-pound box would cost $90 and a 30-pound box would cost $125.

Please note that all donations and project expenditures will be recorded on this site so you can see where your money is going (see the donor list at the top?). Excess funds will be donated to the Georgian NGO Kartli XXI, as described in the previous post.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Let's rock this

Care to join in on our little venture to get blankets and warm clothes to a pair of war-torn villages before winter arrives?

What we want: *Gently-used* blankets and clothing, shipping materials like boxes, money for shipping

Target: the villages of Tortiza and Mejvriskhevi, which were bombed extensively during the recent war; they are very close to Gori, the town that was effectively destroyed

Participants: returned Peace Corps volunteers (myself included) in the US and in Georgia, residents of the local village Kheltubani who act as fact-finders and contacts, the Megobari Project, Kartli XXI (an education NGO), donors of St. Mary's County, Maryland

Project Plan:

Serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Georgia for the last two years, I made a lot of connections with host family and friends in the communities where I worked, and I was received warmly by all my colleagues and neighbors. As such, it seems fitting that instead of blowing all my time watching Project Runway, it would be better to organize a drive to get winter supplies to Georgians in bombed-out villages before winter sets in.

With extensive publicity and multiple donation locations, we will collect gently-used blankets and warm clothes from donors in southern MD, as well as shipping money and boxes. By early October, all the boxes will be packed and in the mail, destined for the headquarters of the Megobari Project, an association of former Georgia Peace Corps volunteers who will store the donation until it can be transferred to an NGO in Gori which will distribute it to needy families in Tortiza and Mejvriskhevi. All leftover money from the shipping fundraiser will be donated to Kartli XXI to buy school suppplies for local children affected by the war.

How to Donate:

Very soon (check back here for exact date information, which as of now depends on the date that the local newspaper prints the publicity article) there will be donation boxes placed at a series of locations around St. Mary's County where you can bring blankets and warm clothing to. There will also be an address and a Paypal account where you can send money for shipping. Alas, the organization that returned Georgia volunteers are creating for the purpose of sending aid to Georgia will not come into legal existence until this project is finished, so my only option is to request that donations be sent to me. I understand that some people may not be comfortable sending money to an individual, but rest assured that:

1) I handled $3400 worth of grants in Georgia with nary a penny embezzled.
2) All monetary donations will be listed on this blog with amounts, unless the donor requests otherwise, and the shipping expenditures and Kartli XXI wire transfer transactions will be detailed here.

So watch this blog for the next week, and we'll get this project started!

Friday, September 12, 2008

Everyone needs a blankie

Hello, all. You seem to have stopped coming to my blog, which is fine because I seem to have stopped posting. Thus, let's shift the purpose here: for the next couple months, this blog will be home to the project to send a donation of warm blankets and clothing to two villages in Georgia for the winter! I have yet to come up with a witty name for this project, though I did decide that if I ever ran a donation campaign of blankets for zombies, it would be called Bedspreads for the Undead (accent on the "un").

We're still in the setting-things-up phase, but check in soon for such extravagant features as...

- a list of donation sites where you can bring your gently-used blankets and warm clothing!

- a list of people and organizations who have donated money toward shipping!

- pictures!

- a detailed project description! which will definitely be the next post because it's rather important!

Stay tuned...

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Back by Popular* Demand

*by "popular" I mean "a"

Those of you who are hard core fans will remember this blog's tragic day back in February 2007 when a carefully-constructed and culturally-sensitive post comparing Borat to Georgia was censored by my ever-cautious employer, the US government. Well, guess what, US government? I'm not a volunteer anymore, and since you haven't responded to my State Department application, you don't own my soul anymore! Here's the post, restored to its former glory. I should note that I put a lot of effort into making it as kind and appropriate as possible, which made the censorship sting all the more. But bygones are bygones...

Borat vs. Georgia
Locations of visitors to this page