Help English Alive Academy design a Christmas Card!

HI – hope that all is going well there – amazed to find a weekly blog so quickly ? – Well, that is because this isn’t really a blog but a competition ! Am struggling with trying to design a nice professional looking Christmas card and now realise that it is best to try to get others to give their suggestions ! We are very keen on selling English Alive Christmas cards this year and even have ambitious plans of having a Christmas catalogue ( time permitting since it really needs to be sent out this week or so ! ) - So hope that we get a good response and some great ideas come flooding in !!

COMPETITION TIME !!!!!!!

Christmas is coming and the cards are coming !

This year English Alive hopes to print their own Christmas cards as well as their own online Christmas catalogue.

However, there is a little glitch in the process since however hard we all try we cannot come up with a decent card. This is where the blog readers come in ! A competition is currently being held for you to design a card for English Alive for Christmas 2010.

Drawings , computer generated images or simply ideas are all eligible for submission.

Closing date for the competition is Sunday 10^th October 2010.

The winner not only sees their design being printed on cards that will be distributed throughout the world but also win a traditional Ethiopian gift.

So get out your sketch books or laptops, put your thinking caps on and take this opportunity to enter this unique competition !

Applications should be submitted to stephanddawit@yahoo.co.uk with the subject being “ competition submission “ The winner will be announced as soon as possible after the submission date.

The winner will be notified by email.

Finally!!!! A van!!!!!!!

Amazingly enough it is all GOOD NEWS this week !!!! – shocking I know since most of the time this blog seems to be a tale of woe and no money !!!

The first of the exciting news is that we managed to get the minivan !!!! – if you recall in our last blog we were out by about 250 pounds – which seemed an impossible amount since we had spent all of our savings and had borrowed everything from everyone ! However, amazingly, Fraser ( a previous Australian volunteer ) saw the blog and his family and friends had a whip around and surprisingly managed to come up with the outstanding amount ! It is so amazing how people can be so generous – they just give and give and give without stopping and we will forever be grateful to Fraser and his family since the van will make a huge difference to the lives of the English Alive children.

The second exciting news is that unbelievably we now have 173 children ( and still counting ! ) at the school !!! – we were very very pleased last year with 107 and now have two nursery classes and two KG 1 classes ! The library has had to be moved out and is now part in one of the classrooms and part in the office – but having a problem of too little space is a great problem to have !!

I used to give 90 % of my wages from working my job in Addis to the school but with this huge number of students this means that the school is almost self sufficient ! – which is one huge step towards our ultimate dream of having enough money to be able to work full time at running our own schools rather than being stuck in Addis Ababa !!

Our latest volunteer – Suzanne starts today at the school – although she is only here for two weeks it all helps and we have interest for the rest of the year although no volunteers in the immediate future !

Overall, it is all going fantastically well and we wish to thank all those people who have helped us to make our dreams come a little bit closer !