Tonight I am writing you from Houston – again!
After spending a week at Quilt Market and Festival, I flew home for a few days, then flew back to Houston for a conference on the NASA / Engineers Without Borders new project in Maua, Kenya. Because eQuilter’s charity program has been funding their projects in Africa (Rwanda, and now Kenya) I was invited to come to this meeting regarding a home and school that is going to be built for the street children of Maua, a small town in the center of Kenya.
In this town, when families have 4 or more kids, they keep the girls but they throw away the boys. These boys that are kicked out of their homes, end up living on the streets, sniffing glue as an opiate, and living in the garbage dump. Our meeting tonight brought together all of the parties who are involved with creating this home and starting the process of getting these kids off the glue-sniffing and giving them some semblance of family and home stability.
I got to hang out with a couple astronauts today too! I got the most super-deluxe VIP tour of NASA from an astronaut who is in line to go to the Space Station. (I was able to visit areas where visitors seldom enter – like the control room of the International Space Station with the live feed!) My quilter friend Pam Holland joined us today on the VIP tour and the meeting on the Kenya project. We were both so impressed at this project that is about to be kicked off by a small but determined group of volunteers from Houston.
So I wanted to let you know that this group of rocket scientists and astronauts send a big thank you to eQuilter and our customers, for supporting their work to help these abandoned children in Rwanda and Kenya. The director of the project is going to send me photos of the kids so you can see these young boys who will be helped. Who would ever imagine that Quilters, Rocket Scientists and Africa could all be mentioned in the same breath?
For your viewing pleasure, I also wanted to show these quilts from the Houston Quilt Festival. The four quilts and their makers are listed below, starting with the top left quilt and going clockwise:
Judy Coates Perez – Pink Bird
Karen Eckmeier – River Stones
Mihoko Tanaka – The Sun Rises in the Bougainvilleas
Brigitte Morganroth – Gebrochene Linien – Broken Lines
