Give a gift - Canberra Girls Grammar School Jnr ACT
Canberra Girls Grammar School (CGGS), ACT wanted to provide every student in their partner school Canberra Sunshine Academy (CSA), Kenya with a personal gift. In 2014 this entailed each CGGS student making up a shoe box of items for a particular student at CSA and GSP shipped these over in a container. However the cost of shipping and customs duty etc has made this prohibitively expensive so the following year each CGGS student donated $10 and GSP bought gave each CSA student a gift bag when the GSP team visited CSA in 2016.
The gift bag contained pens and pencils, exercise books, lollies, soap, sugar and a T-shirt. The impact for the CSA students was huge and this was demonstrated the next day when a CSA family came to us and offered us a live chicken as a thank you gift because they had not had sugar in their house for over a month. Sugar is an important item because many families have little money for food so breakfast for the family is just a cup of sweet tea. Another family came a shook our hands to thank us for the gift bags because "we have not been able to afford soap for 3 weeks" they told us.