an email to friends fam and friendly people!

Dear Friends and Fam,

Hello from Mali! I can't believe time has gone by so fast but in about a month I'll be celebrating my one-year anniversary here. It has certainly been a year of amazing experiences, surprises and fun and I hope alot of you have been able to read my blog and check out my pictures to see what I've been up to (www.nataliegrillon.blogspot.com). Bess, Jared (my sitemates) and I have been really fortunate to have been placed in a community with a lot of motivated individuals and we're looking forward to accomplishing as much as we can in the year we have left.

I wanted to first express my appreciation for the postive feedback from emails, letters and facebook and all of the questions about my work and my life here. I hope this interest that people have expressed can now be extended to helping Gossi with a project important to the youth and the population of my village as a whole. In my work with the youth here and in conversations with various members of the community, it became apparent that the youth lacked an adequate space to come together, where they could organize events and meetings or a space to expand their learning with tutoring, lessons and books outside of a school setting. Currently the youth center is not much more than a courtyard with a stage. Groups occasionally hold dances and kids come by once in awhile to play cards but with no electricity, few chairs and tables, and crumbling walls the space is in neglect and its hard to arrange events or develop new activites. Bess, Jared and I thought that one of the most important things we could do while here was to give the youth a space to call their own and where they could discover more about the world and their community.

We want to start out by building a library with a small snack stand and a computer(both to lure people in to the library!). If we can find the funding we might even be able to bring internet to the village. The library will not only give the community a place to learn and discover individually but also to meet and offer classes. We're also hoping to buy sound equipment for dances, outdoor chairs and tables and a projector to hook up to the computer to have movie nights, which will generate income for the youth activites in addition to the small charge for computer use and the snack stand. The total project cost, without the books and computer, is around $8,000 but we're hoping to find other sources of in-kind donations for the books and computer.

I'm writing to ask for your help in the hope that each of you might be willing to make a small contribution towards the project. I've posted the project online on the Peace Corps website and donations can be made electronically. The website is www.peacecorps.gov and you click on the "donate now" link and then "donate to volunteer projects" and then under the africa section you'll find my project "community youth center" under the title of Mali. Here's also a direct link that might work https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=688-257 .
I realize its a tough time financially in the US right now, but if you can even make a donation of $5, it would be greatly appreciated. Please feel free to pass on to people I've left off on accident or other family and friends - we need all the help we can get! I also apologize for sending out a mass donation soliciting email--forgive me--but I unfortunately don't have unlimited access to internet to write individual emails out.

Any questions or comments, please send along or post on the blog and I thank you in advance!

Natalie