Cleveland Airport Take One

Alright everyone...here is our first attempt at a video update for you...please do your best to refrain from judging this clip, it can only get better! Meghan, Joe, and Christina left Canada yesterday around 9:00 am and arrived at my house in Hudson, OH at 4:00 p.m. Unfortunately for them, we spent the next 6 hours packing 8 suitcases each with 50 pounds of pens, pencils, scissors, glue, paper, and notebooks. It was really amazing to see all of your donations packed up and ready to go. I mean we got over 400 pounds of supplies...not too shabby! Anyway, we just arrived at the airport after hardly sleeping and last minute packing. We are all kind of shy when it comes to being filmed, but we will do our best over the next week to keep in touch. So excited!
-Meghan, Sara, Christina and Joe

Packing for Kenya!

Vermont Reggae Festival Coming up

While packing my suitcases and getting ready to head over to Kenya I have also been working on preparing for the Fountain of Stars Reggae Festival on August 17th and 18th. I will be in Kenya however representatives, Dana, Nicolette, and Michaela will be manning the booth on both days selling t-shirts and bracelets and enjoying the atmosphere. The real challenge has been figuring out how to get a giant box of t-shirts, supplies, gift basket, and beads to New Hampshire  without spending a small fortune! Luckily I have enlisted the help of a good family friend who is going to drive my supplies to NYC where Dana will pick them up. I am SO lucky to have such nice people who are willing to help me. I can't thank them enough and can only tell you that I would not be able to accomplish all of this without them. Anyway, keep an eye out for more information about the festival. It is our first music festival and I'm really excited to see what happens!

CEO's don't take vacations...

...They just temporarily get much better offices!

Attending a phone seminar entitled "Library Development and Book Distribution in West Africa"

One Bead at the Beach! I'm in the pink with 2 of my sisters, Margot and Paige pictured to my right

This past week I went on vacation with my family to Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Aside from eating some delicious seafood and enjoying the beach, I attended two phone seminars sponsored by CGIU. 
A few days before vacation, my mom and I realized that we can't just "go on vacation" on our One Bead website. In other words, we needed to pack all of the supplies required to ship orders of beads from the beach. and it's a good thing we did. One Bead had over 10 orders of bracelets! So during our lunch and dinner breaks from the sand and sea we would take a peek at pay pal and if an order appeared started packing. The next challenges were my phone conferences. The sand ended up making a GREAT chalkboard. I had signed up for phone seminars a while back that were put on by CGIU, which I attended last spring in Washington, DC.  The first one was "Designing and Managing Socially and Economically Sustainable Projects" and the second was "Library Development and Book Distribution in West Africa". The second was particularly interesting to me as my next goal involves building some sort of library at the Oloosirkon Government Primary School. One thing that was emphasized multiple times in each session was the importance of including the community in the process of building. Sustainable projects only work if they are backed by the community in which they evolve. The members of the community surrounding the school can best assess what they need and don't need.
Overall it was a great trip. Now that it is over it's time to focus on the next big thing...Africa!

xxx

Sara