It took almost a year and there were times when we thought it was never going to happen and felt like giving up but from the 1st December, ABANA is officially a charity in law!
from now on this blog will become the ABANA charity blog and through its pages i hope to keep you informed about exactly what we are doing to raise money and how we are using the money we raise, or rather the money you have donated.
I will also use these pages to write more about Rwanda which has never ceased to tug at my heart even though we left just over a year ago.
Firstly - ABANA - we are starting as a small charity and our target is to raise £5,000 a year.
We are now registered with http://www.charitygiving.co.uk/ and for every £10 you donate, a further £2 is added via gift aid.
you can read our mission statement on Charity Giving but i will repeat it again here:
ABANA has been set up to promote the Education of young people in rural Rwanda by sponsoring individual students through secondary school and on to further education by paying school fees and providing school uniforms and necessary writing materials.
Selected students would otherwise be unable to access Education as a result of their desperate poverty.
ABANA also intends to advance the education of young people in the Groupe Scolaire Notre Dame de la Paix in Cyanika , southern Rwanda by assisting in the provision of facilities and resources.
By assisting in the provision of education and training and providing the necessary support to enable individuals to generate a sustainable income, ABANA will also help in the relief of poverty and financial hardship which is a terrible fact of life for most young Rwandans.
Why should we help?
Imagine if through no fault of your own, you were born in a country where abject poverty was the norm,you are extremely intelligent and desperate to get on in the world, you want to learn all there is to learn, you are desperate for Education. If you are lucky, your parents will be able to find enough money to buy you a school uniform so you can attend primary school; you have one writing book and the school is so overcrowded you have to attend school in shifts but you are learning and you want to carry on learning. Unfortunately, secondary education costs the equivalent of £120 a year - maybe your parents will never find enough money to send you, or they may be able to send you for a term or a year and then the money runs out and you go back to helping your family cultivate their tiny bit of land but you never give up hope.
This is how we can help!
£140 is nothing to us but it can do so much for a young rwandan and as i am sure i have mentioned many times in this blog, Rwandans are such lovely dignified people, despite having nothing and the children are always smiling!
What we have done already:
even before becoming official, we held a couple of fund raising events- a car boot sale, a cross bay walk and a talk and we have already received generous donations from friends and family. As a result of this, we are already helping and will continue to help quite a few young people and you cannot believe how we have given them hope that their lives could change.
Now we will be able to help so many more!
Since becoming official we have had 2 succesful christmas busking sessions, 1 in lancaster and 1 in Preston.
Our lovely daughter did a 10k run on Sunday 9th jan and persuaded lots of her friends to sponsor us - thanks again
