A sunshine hello to all,

Almost too nice to be writing emails. I do want to give you news about
recent events in our region. Glacier Grannies had their yearly
African Dinner, which was fabulous, excellent food, great silent auction
and a spell binding presentation about our African experiences by Tina
Fillipino, with a short section on Rwanda by myself. Congratulations to
the Glaciers! As a fundraiser the evening was a great success as well,
but I am not sure of the exact amount, feel free to fill in GG’s.
Merville Grannies followed on May 9th, in the restored Merville Hall
with its marvelous acoustics. Admission was by donation, they had
organized a quick silent auction with stuff that was really not needed
anymore at home, had baked yummy goodies and brought some plants for
sale. I enjoyed their ‘gumbootsdance’, maybe you can put it on YouTube
Tina! Despite getting into the paper rather late, the posters and word
of mouth brought 100 people to hear our presentations, some from as far
away as Quadra. The evening brought in over $2,000.- for the Foundation,
well done!
Last night I attended the Oceanside event ‘Both Sides of the Camera’, a
fun and very interesting evening presenting Rosemary Thompson, the CBC
and CTV journalist and Virginia Thompson, Presidant of Verite Films and
Executive Producer of InSecurity and Corner Gas, being encouraged by
Shelagh Rogers to tell the behind the scenes stories of their lives and
careers. The Grand Hotel in Nanaimo had made their Ballroom available
for the event, and it was barely large enough for the crowd. A big thank
you to Heather for thinking of this idea, and all the other Oceanside
G2G’s for organizing.
NanGo’s will be having their African Market on June 7th at St Paul’s
Anglican Church. I will be presenting stories from Ethiopia in the
morning during this event, and talking about Rwanda projects and
Hillcrest in South Africa in the afternoon. Will send posters soon. Port
Alberni has invited me to come talk at their meeting June 26th, and Tina
is going to do a road trip up north on the mainland, and will be talking
in Quesnel I believe.
This whole story is coming to you all as I received an email from Kate
Clark to say she is stepping down as a group contact, and I wanted to
take the opportunity to update my list. So if you received this, but
someone else in your group has taken over the contact position, please
let me know.
Warm regards to all,

Paxie