Hello everyone, and happy last month of Spring. Its hard to believe how fast time is going by these days; our last post was from January! We have lots to catch up on and, as ever, the best way to do that is to go visit all the different students’ pages. But at least we can give you some ideas of all that is happening in our students’ worlds.

Beautiful Jeni

In Tanzania, Jeni A. is in her last year of the university studying biomedical engineering. She’ll be graduating in December and then our contacts Greg and Shannon are really hoping they can get her some kind of internship here in the United States. As usual, she’s been killing it!

Jeni J. is in her second year of teaching college at Morogoro, and she is loving it. She hopes to go on for a bachelor’s degree, which would give her a great advantage in terms of finding work.

Winnifrida at university

Winnie is in her first year at the University in Mbeya (the same place Jeni A. is studying). Winnie is studying business administration and marketing and she is thinking of going into law later on. We are waiting for a post-secondary application from her, but we have no doubt we will continue to support her.

In Kenya, Mercy has finished her secondary school (Kenya only goes through Form 4), and she has been accepted into a teaching college. She finished at the top of her class, so she was hoping to be sent to a medical school so she could be a doctor. We are waiting to hear what she would like to do. She can repeat the year and try and get into medical school (although since she already finished at the top of her class, we’re not sure how that would help), or she could go to teaching college with an emphasis in math, continue to get a bachelor’s and then come to the US on a visa for math teaching. This would give her a huge advantage in Kenya in terms of finding a job. We’ll support her no matter what she decides. It’s been tough for her recently; massive floods have cut off access to their village and they were even out of school for quite a while.

In Nepal, Bharosha completed her last year of secondary school (the +2 part of the Nepalese “10+2” system). She has taken her state exams and is waiting to hear about moving on to study medicine. Amrita finished her 10th year and we hope her exam scores will allow her to study pharmacy for 11th and 12th grade. Khusbu is now in 10th grade and doing so much better. And Sumira is in 6th grade, and loving her classes—and sports!

Ballet Folklorico dances framed by a wooden box made by local teacher Amy Dries

On April 28, we held our annual in-person fundraiser at Heritage Square in downtown Flagstaff. We had several local school there with ceramics, woodworking, metal work, prints, jewelry and lots of other things for sale. And we had several musical and dance performances from the students at Flagstaff Arts and Leadership Academy, as well as a full hour of amazing Ballet Folklorico! The day was perfect: cool and sunny and barely windy at all, which is something close to a miracle if you know Flagstaff’s spring weather! Between the day and the online fundraiser we held for the month of March, we raised slightly more than $8000 to help keep our students in school, and support them in the more expensive levels that many of them have entered. We can’t thank all of you enough for your generosity! We’re so proud of our students and we (and they) couldn’t do any of this without you.

Happy June!

Christa, Birgit, Meghan, Janeece, and Leslie