BOOKS WANTED!!! URGENT!!!

BOOKS WANTED IN THE ATLANTA ( US ) REGION - A US volunteer is coming at very short notice who has unlimited luggage allowance ! - thus books ( or any school supplies ) wanted URGENTLY !!!!! - call 770-712-3531 if you are in the region and have something to donate for poor Ethiopian children ! - every little bit makes a difference !

Happy Easter

HAPPY EASTER TO ALL OF OUR FOLLOWERS

The biggest problem facing the school this week is that there is no petrol in the town of Nazret ! No one seems to know why and when it will come back , but although we struggled with the school bus yesterday , there is no fuel for today so the school is closed. The good thing is that we break for Easter on the Friday , so hope that fuel is back by Monday so school can carry on ! Exams start next Wednesday, so it is vital that the school bus is up and running by then !

Next week, Iris – our volunteer from Holland leaves after an exceptional four week stay. She really has worked hard at enthusing the teachers and attempting different ways to make English grammar exciting ! There will now be a little break with volunteers , until the end of May when Helen from the UK arrives.

Although applications for the summer usually have to be booked at least 6 months ahead, due to a last minute cancellation, we have one spare place for the summer school which runs from July 17^th – about 27^th August – so is anyone is interested , please visit the website www.englsihaliveacadmey.org  for more information as well as the application form.

My latest delve into modern technology has been the formation of a twitter account ! – must admit that knowledge about it is limited, but since I didn’t really know about facebook until a couple of months ago, realise that knowledge doesn’t really matter ! – At the moment we don’t have any followers ! – so if you are a twitterer ( is that the correct term ?! ) then follow us on : ethiopiaschool

As promised last week when UK surfers and shoppers were targeted,  the information for  US surfers and shoppers follows :  ( sorry for all those millions of people who live in other countries for not providing you with information, HOWEVER  - please feel free to go ahead and set up your own English Alive surfers and shoppers accounts ! – a great way to justify your latest spending spree ! )

SURFERS:

You can now raise funds when you search the web!

Use iSearchiGive every time you search the web and raise money for each and every search !
By using iSearchiGive instead of Google or any other search engine, you can make a real difference. iSearchiGive is completely FREE and by making just 10 searches a day, you could raise around £20 a year for English Alive.

As well as raising funds, iSearchiGive also gives you the best search results available on web. Today, the Internet is so big that different search engines will often deliver different results for the same search. So, by combining the strengths of several search engines together - Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com, MIVA, and many more - you get the very best results in terms of accuracy and relevance, which means you'll find what you're looking for quickly and easily every time - all in one 'easy' search!

Simply visit : www.iSearchiGive.com/englishalive

Choose : English Alive Academy

And start fundraising !!!!

SHOPPERS (USA only – see previous blog for UK details )

It’s the easiest way to help raise money for Ethiopia’s English Alive Academy! If you already shop online with the major retailers  such as Amazon, EBay and thousands of high street stores, then we need you to sign up or free to raise money while you shop.

So how does it work ?

You shop directly with the retailer as you would normally, but if you sign up to :

www.iGive.com/englishalive

for free and use the links on the site to take you to the retailer, then a percentage of whatever you spend comes directly to us at no extra cost to yourself.

Ethiopian Schools for the Poor - English Alive Academy
Registered Charity Number 1140681

No fuel....No School!

There is no petrol in Nazret ! - as a result, although we have enough fuel to keep the school bus going today, we wont have enough for tomorrow - thus the school has to be closed !!! - lets hope that fuel comes in for after the Easter holiday !

Fundraising! Fundraising! Fundraising!

Time seems to be flying by this year, with the Easter exams coming up next week. I still think that it is a bit silly for children aged 3 to be subjected to exams three times a year, but since this is governmental regulated, there isn’t much we can do about it apart from make them as exciting as possible !!

Iris – the latest volunteer from Holland is settling in nicely, although was sick this week – probably the hundreds of little children clamouring over her had something to do with it ! However, that didn’t stop her for long and she is busy sorting out the literature programme at the school ! We really are lucky in that like Paula, she is a fundraising expert – and as luck would have it, in another area – that of grants ! As a result am learning all sorts of interesting things ! – it is amazing what you don’t know ! and what seems so easy to other people is like a revelation to me. Two amazing things that I learnt this week :

a/. that you can save word documents as acrobat reader files !!!! ( simply click save as ( just in case you don’t know either ! )

b/. that website places ( hosts ! ) also have email facilities !!!! – thus have a wonderful new email address : info@englishaliveacademy.org!!!

Really do think that I have learnt more new things in the past few months then have learnt for years ! – you do tend to stick to the things that you know what to do and keep doing them – but now am in a whole new world of fundraising !!!

We are now registered at www.thebiggive.org.uk – which takes credit card donations ! – Simple and easy – just click and pay !!!!

Paula ( the previous fundraising expert ) is busy at work with organising presentations at Rotary clubs which is fantastic ! – as well as busy editing and advising my first initial steps in this fundraising world ! – wonderful to have so much help – it really makes me feel that at long last English Alive could be fully self sufficient in the very near future with wonderful things just around the corner !!

This week saw the start of our latest volunteer – Iris – from Holland – who came to work multitasking working not only multitasking working not only with the kindergarten children but with the grade school as well as teaching English to the teachers ! She is here for a month so that will give everyone the boost that they need ! Easter isn’t for a few weeks yet , with exams to come before that – so things are quire busy at the moment !

Small group learning support groups for the kindergarten have not started. There are a few children who are slightly behind the others in terms of basic letter recognition and pencil control skills thus lunch classes to give them additional assistance have started. We would love to give much more emphasis upon learning support and as a result have applied for a grant to develop a separate room complete with equipment such as a computer, tape machine etc – so fingers crossed !

Fundraising continues to slow – currently trying to get the facebook group membership (Ethiopian Schools for the Poor - English Alive Academy) up to 200 members by next week ( we currently have 148 members ) since I feel that when we launch our sponsorship campaign then that will be a great starting point ! Plodding on with the website to get it incredibly easy for people to sponsor and hope that it can all be up and running by next week !!

One great thing this week was that a school in Watford UK suddenly wrote out of the blue to mention that they wish to donate books since the school was going to throw them out ! – You can never have too many books, so this is a great opportunity to expand the library ! This just goes to show that even though you think that no one really knows about you, in fact, people are looking out for you and success in the form of donations and funds is just a few clicks away!

Wonderful Volunteers!!!!

Things here in Ethiopia are on the up ! – our latest volunteer – Paul has now returned to the USA and the latest volunteer - Iris is due to take the bus journey to Nazareth Sunday for her stay of three weeks . We really are doing very well with volunteers at the moment, with Helen from the UK booked to come at the end of May and two people already booked for the summer school !

Last week we had the school inspectors in – but for the first time ever – we were pleased to see them since they were evaluating us for the Nazareth best school competition ! From the fifteen or so schools in Nazareth , we were rated in the top three and thus to finalise the decision the school inspectors came to assess us ! Not really sure what they were looking for since the educational bureau here doesn’t value the same things as I might, but nonetheless, they looked quite happy and were more than impressed with our library and shelves of resources !

Not sure when the competition result will be out ( or even what the prize is !( if anything ! ) but it is great to be in the top three , especially as we are a disadvantage since our building is only rented meaning that the layout isn’t as we would like ! – So that has boosted everyone and there is a renewed sense of achievement!

On the fundraising front things are going slowly – as Paula our previous volunteer who was an expert always said , to be successful in fundraising you do the small boring things seemingly forever and then suddenly boom – there is a miracle ! – So I suppose that we are at the bottom of the ladder of boring things but need to focus on the miracle which is there waiting for us at the end !!!

Still trying to sort out the website ( not an easy task from Ethiopia ! ) so that we can launch our sponsorship campaign, but plodding on with the facebook. This has been made significantly more difficult however due to the fact that the digital camera was dropped and it is no longer working, meaning that the exciting daily events of the school are difficult to capture !

On the writing front had my biggest job ever ( £ 340 which says a lot for the other jobs I have been doing ! ) – 10,000 words on autism !  It seemed achievable when I started it , however that really is a lot of words and then once you add on references ,contents pages and appendices etc then it all came to about 14,000 !!!! I must say that it nearly killed me and I would definitely think twice about taking on so many words again ( especially in a subject which I know relatively little about ! ) However, the money really will come in handy and will keep us going for another month or two !!!Best to think in the short term these days !!!