hopetees

INDONESIA

At Easter, Cassandra went along with Richard and Johanna Wallace to the island of Nias. We left on friday 25th march and returned the 31st, different people. The 8.7M Easter earthquake neatly sliced our week in two: easy days of laughter with kids turned into days of stress and sadness. As for the tees, the day of the quake we had gone house to house on the island of Bawa, handing out clothing, stickers and simple school kits bought with the cash from sales . The tees that were left over ended up in an emergency medical tent where patients immediately put them on. Two women put one on a boy with cerebral malaria. Ironically, he was as unable to see the colourful design and message as the blind girl who got one on Bawa.

Picture taken outside medical tent after three days moving around at night, camping, a cross island motorbike journey over broken roads and bridges, one meal and about a hundred earthquakes, some of them 6M. This lady crawled out from her collapsed building with her little daughter on her back. Her two injured sons were airlifted.

more on Rich and Jo's work in Nias involving coconut oil production, vegetable gardening and surfing: www.feelthelove.org

SRI LANKA
A small team from The Vine Christian Fellowship went to Sri Lanka over the Easter break with extensive excess baggage granted by Cathay Pacific. They went to visit several tsunami family camps and handed out 25 hope tees there. www.thevine.org.hk

HONG KONG
The design on this tee was made from a collage of childrens drawings. We asked them to draw hands with gifts, everyday things they would give, and told them the story of Noah's Ark as inspiration. Then we asked them to think of a simple message. They came up with "Roses are red, violets are blue, sending a smile from all of us to you."

This way, the process of design involved the local community.
Roughly half of the tees were sold to cover the cost of giving the other half away. A substantial amount was sold at the Rugby Sevens South Stand....

This first project of 100 tees we did was made possible by a HK$1000 donation from my dad with additional printing expenses covered by FirstMobile. We tried to get other sponsors and a charity on board by sending out proposals, but it proved impossible as two individuals. I have to take this opportunity to vent my observations of Giordano's conduct at this point: they received and read the proposal, but I was never able to talk to the relevant marketing person. I was also in touch with Worldvision. WV, bless them, chose to work with Giordano when approached by them... a short time later... with the same idea. A month later or so, G launched their "World without Strangers" promotion: a Benetton-esque series of Tshirts that looked like a fundraising campaign, with those rubber wristbands charties use on sale alongside. When asked, any sales assistant would stress that none of G profits would go to any charity. Nuff said.

Sales brought around $3200 in cash which was supplemented with more donations of clothes from Frontline Clothing Ltd. We bought boxes of coloured pencils, pencil sharpeners, rulers, notebooks, mickey mouse watches, rubiks cubes, calculators...