Following up on yesterday’s post of Victoria Falls. Thank you so very much to all of you for your kind offers to donate supplies to the group. It is heartwarming to see such thoughtfulness and the response was totally unexpected! I have given this some thought and although tempted to accept your generous offers it may not be the most practical solution.
The postal system in South Africa is very unreliable, in fact it does not work – so the chances are your donations would get lost in cyber space. The only way it could reach us is if you sent it by Courier and besides the great expense to yourselves I would have to pay customs duties on each parcel when it arrived. Then I would have to forward it to the Victoria Falls and again they would have to pay customs duties. This is the way it is in Africa, duty is charged on all imported items.
I could put a donate button on my site and any donations received would go towards purchasing threads, needles and hoops for the embroidery group at wholesale prices. A donation of US$6 would be enough to purchase a whole box of DMC stranded cotton, and this would go a long way to enabling them to get going with their embroidery co-op and becoming self sufficient. The amount you donate would be completely up to you and I could purchase the items and send them to Gail who would make sure they were delivered to Victoria Falls. I will of course keep you posted with their progress from time to time and let you know what we donated. How does this sound?
Trish