The Countdown is ON!

So long time no see! (Again.) It has been another month since my last post but I have still been accumulating news for you.

We have had two more bake sales at parent's evenings, one at S4 and one at S5/6. And I have a picture this time!

We went in not hoping for anywhere near what we got at the last one. But each time we have surprised and surpassed ourselves. At the S4 bake sale we raised £320.40 and then our most yet at the S5/6 with £328.40!!!! We still have one more to go but it's not for a while so I'll let you know how it goes.

I've also received more donations from family and friends and I am so grateful for the continued support. I would like to say a special thank you to my nanny and her friends who have been very generous and supportive. I also found out the other day that one her friends has a friend whose daughter has been away to Honduras. It's a small world!

As we all know it is Christmas is coming up and usually my mum and my nanny donate money to charity instead of sending Christmas cards. However this year 'charity starts at home', in the words of nanny and both of them have donated the money they would have given to charity to me instead!

Final update - Emma McRory, my mum's friend, has knitted ten woolly hats to sell for my cause, raising £110!

So overall this has taken me up to £4,246.73 (ish!)! So less than £800 left to go before the Realising Dreams Foundation steps in to help me with the last bit and with everything I have planned and left to do, I should have it all covered! I have one more bake sale, at the S2 parent's evening, which is hopefully another £300 (touch wood!) and I have still to include the money my uncle after giving up one pint of beer a week.

I am also in the process of organising a Global Citizenship themed non-uniform day at my old primary school. Global citizenship is a big part of what Project Trust advocates and is a key part of any volunteer's year abroad. Being a global citizen is all about having an awareness of the wider world and your place in it and wanting to make the world a more equal and sustainable place.

My plan is to run a series of workshops with P1-3, P4/5 and P6/7 with the help of Belle, a returned PT volunteer who went to Honduras last year. These will be done the week before the non-uniform day which is set for Friday 5th February, chosen not just because it's the day before the February holidays but also because it is the day before the UNICEF Day for Change - rather fitting, I thought! The idea is that on the day, the kids pay a pound to come dressed like someone from their favourite country - example, a surfer dude in a cork hat from Australia - or in the colours of the flag.

I am very excited to meet Belle and hear all about her time in Honduras. I'm going to apologise to her now for bombarding her with millions of questions but I'm very grateful that she is willing to take the time to come and help me with my fundraising.

On that note, this weekend I went in to Stirling to what PT call coffee catch ups, where you can meet other volunteers in the area and talk to a staff member or a returned volunteer. Unfortunately, because of the weather up on Coll, the ferry hasn't been able to get in so Laura wasn't able to come down and meet us. Instead my mum and I met Craig from Linlithgow who volunteered in Ghana and Nuala from Balfron who volunteered in India, both in 2012/13. We got there at the start and stayed for the full two hours. I think Craig was a bit overwhelmed by my constant chatter but I think that when Nuala arrived she understood my excitement a little bit more.

It was great to find out how their experiences were and get some insider tips, even if they weren't from the same country as me. I even got a very important question answered, one that has been weighing heavily on me since I was selected - how do I take a years worth of books to Honduras in a backpack? The simple answer, one that pains me to admit, is that I have to buy... a Kindle. That aside, it was a really helpful meeting and Nuala and Craig were great.

Unfortunately I only got to meet one other local volunteer but she's not going to be far away. Sacha is from Comrie and will be volunteering in the Dominican Republic for her year out. She was selected a few months after me so I was more than happy to share my successes (and failures) and it was fun to have someone to talk to about selection, ideas and how daunting fundraising is when you start.


So that's all for now. Expect things to be a bit quiet on the fundraising front for a while, the next event being the non-uniform day in February. In the meantime, I wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy new year! Thank you for all of your incredible support this year, I can't quite believe it, and hopefully it can continue into the new year to help me reach my target.

And just think, this time next year, I'll be celebrating on a beach on the Caribbean coast. Try not to be too jealous!

WOOHOO!!! Celebrating smashing £4000 on top of 3G hill on Coll

Where do I begin?

It feels like ages since I've updated  on here which I'm sorry about but it's only actually been a month! But it's been a very busy month!

I'll start off with my not so good news from October. So as you all know I was planning a Halloween party for the end of the month but due to poor ticket sales we were forced to cancel it, even after several attempts at rescuing it. It was unfortunate and a big disappointment but, hey, it's not the end of the world.

In the meantime, on to more positive things. Since my last post where I talked about the Realising Dreams Foundation, I have received two more donations from charitable trusts. My local rotary club of Bridge of Allan and Dunblane have given me a grant of £200 and I also received a cheque for £300 from the Allan and Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust.

A few other little things to wrap up from this month. Another £22.50 from nanny's mug mat sales, £120 in donations and the £20 winnings from the Rugby World Cup, won by New Zealand and Ed Payne, which was kindly given back to me.

And now onto the good stuff!! I had my first bake sale, at the S1 parent's evening, (no picture I'm afraid, which was a bit of an oversight but I'll get a photo at the next one to show you the spread!). It went spectacularly well and we raised £301.94! It was a great start so now we just need to keep that up for the rest of them!

Finally, my most recent and most successful event so far has been a raffle on the handmade quilt that we tried to sell back in August. That didn't really work but this time we were selling tickets for £5 each, the money could be donated on my Virgin Money Giving page. It ran for around two and a half weeks and finished on Thursday 5th November. Congratulations to Karen Monaghan - the quilt will be winging it's way to you in Boston very shortly! And a big thank you to everyone that bought tickets and raised £950!!! This will pay for an amazing two months in Honduras.

So overall, progress-wise, since my last post I have smashed both the target of £2,000 and £3,000 and am sitting at £3,051.22! So have some pictures to celebrate seeing as I don't have one of the bake sale.

A picture painted by one of the girls from my selection course after getting home from Coll

The girls at the ceilidh on the last night of select

One Massive Step Closer To Realising My Dreams

A few little things have added more money to the pot since my last post but with some big new coming at the end!

First off, a big thank you to my neighbour Irene Bruce who sold some homemade tablet in the staffroom at school and raised £16 for me. Also a big thank you to my nanny and some of her friends for £25 - nanny has been selling mug mats for me at home in Northern Ireland. Finally, I organised a last minute Rugby World Cup sweepstake that pulled in £40 with a £20 cash prize waiting for whoever drew the eventual winners. Every little helps, as they say!

I have also spent the last few weeks creating a fundraising leaflet and writing letters to send out to charitable trusts. The range of trust available to me is fairly limited mostly because most will not give to individual fundraisers and there are not that many that operate inside Scotland but the handful that I have seem to be well suited to what I am doing. I will post my letters once my leaflet is printed and I am incredibly grateful to the Realising Dreams Foundation who have offered to do this for me.

The Realising Dreams Foundation aims to support individual children and young people (aged 5 to 21 years old) with a talent, drive and ambition who haven’t been able to realise their dreams because of a lack of funding or support from other charities.

However, there's even better news to come from the Realising Dreams Foundation. As well as agreeing to print my leaflet for me and promote my blog on their website, they have promised that if I reach a target of £5,000 they will pay for the remaining £1,200!!! This a massive step towards Honduras and I am so grateful for their support.
 

My First Milestone

Quite a lot of news, but the first bit is that we did it! I have officially hit the £1000 milestone, with a running total of £1055! I have received a steady stream of donations since I got home from Costa Rica as well as having a couple of fundraising events.

To start with I would like to say thank you to the donors from my Virgin Money Giving page, Randal McDowell and Fiona Steen. Another big thank you to Rich Lambert for the cheque I received in the post, which makes these donations £120 overall!

My first official fundraising event took place on Sunday 30th August and was a Costa Rica coffee morning. I absolutely loved it because I literally got to talk about my trip for hours! There was cake, Tesco's Finest Costa Rican coffee and many, many photos and everyone from my friends, my parent's friends, teachers and even some long lost friends came for a chat.

It was great to see everyone who came and to all those who couldn't make but still donated, a huge thank you! (There's going to be a lot of that in this post!) Between the cakes, some crafty things we were selling and the absentee donations we raised £385.70! I had a great time and I hope I didn't bore too many people with my stories!

Next up was a sly game of Guess the Number of Sweets in the Jar in my school library for all the S6's, sly because I'm not 'technically' allowed to do any fundraising in school. I went around at break and lunch selling guesses for 50p or 3 for £1 and raised £60. Congratulations to Eve Colgan, the winner with the closest guess of 272.


I'm now onto creating my leaflet and finishing my trust research in preparation for writing to them, hopefully by the end of September. I'm also gearing up for my Halloween party at the end of October with the most difficult decision being... what should my costume be???

Outside of fundraising, I met up with a group of people from my selection course at the Glasgow uni open day. It was really nice to see them all again and hear about how all their fundraising is going. I have also been talking to Ellie Crozier, a girl from the year above me who is ready and waiting to go to South Africa with Project Trust as soon as her visa comes through. Just talking to her makes me even more excited for when it will be my turn. I wish her all the best for when she finally gets there and can't wait to see her pictures and hear her stories!

I can't say it enough so I'll say it again - thank you to everyone who has donated so far and keep watching here and on my Facebook page for more updates. 

Costa Rica, Coffee Mornings and Count the Sweets

I'm back! Did you miss me? It's been a while since I've given any updates on my progress, I know, but I've been away having incredible adventures in Costa Rica! For those of you that are interested I'll tell you a bit about my four amazing weeks there. If you're just here to see my fundraising news, skip to the end to find out what's going on.

During my summer holidays I spent a month in Costa Rica, a Central American country separated from Honduras by Nicaragua, with a volunteering organisation called GVI. The first week was cultural immersion with eight other teenagers from all around the world - we had Americans, Canadians, more Brits and even a Swiss boy. Cultural immersion meant four hours of Spanish lessons a day, salsa class and cooking class and staying with a host family for a week.

This was one of my favourite parts of my whole trip. Staying with the host family improved my Spanish more than the lessons did because my family didn't speak much English so it was up to me to make conversation and pass along information in Spanish. My tican family (tico is a term Costa Ricans use to refer to themselves) were absolutely amazing and I loved spending a whole week as part of their family, with an American girl from my group and two other American students they had staying with them. It was a very busy house!

My tica parents and roommate Kelly

After spending a week in Quepos with our host families, we moved to a hostel in the neighbouring hillside town of Manuel Antonio where we were joined by another eight volunteers. The next two weeks were spent doing construction work at a school in a community called Roncador. It was hard work under a hot sun but we got through a massive amount of work, more than anyone expected. We dug drains to stop the playground flooding, cleared, levelled and landscaped an area behind the kindergarten classroom for a new playground for the kindergarten kids, wirebrushed and painted tin panels for a new roof for the GVI English classroom, filled in the holes in the wall with cement and gave the lunch hall, kindergarten classroom, outside wall and English classroom all a fresh coat of paint!

The playground we made for the kindergarten children

 One day we got to have a sports day with the kids, and while we'd seen them in their lessons and running around during their breaks this was the first time we got to interact with them. They practised their English on us and we practised our Spanish on them, and we got to really meet the people that we were doing all this work for. It reminded us all why we were there, where all our sweat and effort was actually going.

The English classroom as we left it - complete with GVI mural!

They day we left the project for the last time after two weeks there was a sad one and I think part of us wished we could stay for another week and do more. I am so proud of what we achieved throughout those two weeks and I know that the difference we have made will have a very real impact on the kids. It gives them a safer, cleaner, nicer learning environment to learn in and be proud of.

After two weeks of hard work we moved into our adventure week! We started with a trip to the Manuel Antonio National Park where we saw everything from monkeys and baby boa constrictors to spiders, lizards and crabs climbing trees and even a sloth! The next day we took to the beach where I learnt that surfing is just as hard as it looks (which is hard!) but about a hundred times more fun!

On the Monday of our last week we left the Quepos-Manuel Antonio area which had been my home for the last three weeks and drove across to the other side of Costa Rica to Turrialba. For our next adventure we went ziplining and abseiling in the rainforest before embarking on a rafting trip down the Rio Pacuare, one of the best rivers in the world for rafting. We spent two days navigating down class III and IV rapids and on the day in between we hiked to an indigenous village.

When it was time to leave Costa Rica, I was heartbroken. It is such a beautiful country, from the stunning landscape to the warm, welcoming people. Costa Rica will always be very special to me, as my first proper experience of travelling, as will the global friendships that I formed there. For now all I will say is pura vida Costa Rica, and you never know, I might make it down to see you while I'm in Honduras!

Now I am back in Scotland and back at school and it's time to start fundraising again! This week in school I'm running a 'Guess the Number of Sweets on the Jar' at school and on Sunday morning I'm hosting a coffee morning at my house to share my stories and photos from Costa Rica.

Costa Rica felt like a mini version of what it will be like in Honduras and it has made the excitement real and given me something solid to look forward to. I can't wait to get further into my fundraising and closer to my year on Honduras!

Honduras Hiatus

This blog post is just to let you all know that I will be going quiet on the Project Trust front for the next month. Tomorrow I head off to Costa Rica on a volunteering expedition with a company called GVI so all thought on Honduras will probably be put on hold!

A couple of things have been going on since the last time I posted. The silent auction of the handmade quilt didn't work, with no bids, but don't worry! We are keeping it for later and plan to try it with a raffle instead. I have also booked my local hall for a Halloween party on Friday 30th October, which I'll be selling tickets in school for. It is booked for the Saturday 6th February as well, to hold a family ceilidh to celebrate my sister and I's 18th birthday - more news on both of those a little closer to the time!

Once I get back from Costa Rica, I will be working hard to create a leaflet all about my year volunteering and my fundraising plans to be handed out at events and distributed to charitable trusts, who I will also be writing to as soon as possible once I return. I hope to hold a coffee morning at the start of September but that will be planned once I get back. Feel free to come along and hear about my travels - past and future!

This is it from me until the middle of August but I hope everyone has an amazing summer and I'll see you on the other side!

I Promise I'll Calm Down Soon!

A week in and I still can't quite believe it! I'm so excited that I can't help talking about it to everyone - I promise I'll calm down eventually!

After receiving my acceptance letter last Saturday, I am now impatiently waiting for my fundraising booklet to come through from Project Trust. I've not been sitting back doing nothing though. On Monday, as soon as I got into school, I went to my head of year and nabbed all the bake sales at parents evening after school. This may be all the help I get from my school, apart from being able to use it as a free venue, but I'll take what I can get, and everyone loves a bake sale!

I also inquired about setting up a link with my old primary school. I was told to come back after the holidays as everything was wrapping up for the summer but it was a positive response from them. I hope to be able to offer them some Spanish lessons and talks on my experiences both before and after I go, in exchange for (more!) bake sales, a non uniform day, and some other things like that.

Meanwhile, I spent an hour and a half in Stirling library yesterday going through The Directory of Grant Making Trusts, looking for any that support areas like overseas aid, education and young people. I found some that look promising but a large majority don't give grants to individuals which is incredibly frustrating! But I'm not done yet and there was a big chunk I didn't get through yesterday.

Even though I'm not going to be able to run any actual fundraising events until August, I have started with a silent Facebook auction, held by my mum, for a homemade quilt made by my nanny (picture below). I am also looking into dates for a Halloween party in October and a fundraising ceilidh to coincide with my 18th birthday in February. I'll keep you posted...

For anyone that wants to keep more up to date with my progress, check out my Facebook page for my year overseas, Sara's Year in Honduras for regular updates. I have set up a Virgin Money Giving page as well and would like to give a big shout out to my first donor for an incredibly generous donation!  Every single penny means a lot to me and I want to say thank you for your support.


(The handmade quilt for silent auction. Anyone interested can leave a comment here with a bid. There is a reserve price that has been set to cover the cost of materials and time and if this is not met the quilt will not be sold. Thank you for any interest.)

How It All Started...

I first heard about Project Trust when a girl in the year above me at school got a place with them to spend a year in an orphanage in South Africa. I didn't really pay much attention to it apart from being aware of some of her fundraising events. I never really thought it was something I would want to do myself.

But then a returned volunteer from Japan came to our school and talked to us all about Project Trust and her year overseas. From then on I was captivated and I knew I had to try it! Travel has always been a big part of my plans for the future and to me this was the perfect opportunity to combine it with my love of languages and a little bit of procrastination about what I want to do in life!

In June 2015 I set off to the Inner Hebridean isle of Coll for my Selection Course. From the minute I arrived in the hostel in Oban where we stayed the night before an awfully early ferry, I knew that it was going to be an amazing week. I was surrounded by like-minded people who never let me feel out of place for even a second. While on Coll, we didn't have a minute to relax (or miss home, though don't tell them I said that!) but it didn't matter because it was so much fun. We did everything from digging lazy beds, teaching a lesson, fundraising workshops and climbing Coll's highest hill, Ben Hough which stands at only 106m high.

My selection group

I came away from Coll having had the best week of my life, and I don't say that lightly! I left with a completely different idea of where I wanted to go than from when I arrived, changing my mind from doing social care in Peru to teaching English in Honduras. I also left with a bunch of new friends that I hope I will keep in touch with.

The real start to my year though was on Saturday morning. Just before I went out to work, my mum told me I had a letter. I almost didn't dare to hope that it was from Project Trust because we'd been told it would be ten days before we would hear anything and I thought I still had two days to wait. But it was from them and, after almost falling over while running to grab the letter from my mum, I opened it to find out that I had been accepted and Project Trust were offering me a place in Honduras for a year!

I was thrilled because Honduras was my first choice. I will spend the year teaching English to schoolchildren while also improving my Spanish - bonus! We won't find out the final details of our projects until May so until then this is about all I know!

From now on it's all about the fundraising. With twelve months to raise over £6200, it's going to be tough but that's what's going to make it even more special when I reach the end goal. My brain has been going into overdrive ever since the letter arrived, heck, ever since I got back from my selection course, about ways to raise the money but not annoy the hell out of everybody. I eagerly await the arrival of the fundraising pack that's on it's way. I have a feeling that it's going to become my bible for the next year!

So far, I've already looked into making a leaflet telling people about my trip to give out at events and also send to the hundreds of charitable trusts I'm planning to write to. Bring on the envelopes, the stamps and the inevitable hand cramp! I am also planning on having a ceilidh at some point, want to look into doing some bagpacks, and will be having endless bake sales I'm sure. Watch this space for more news!