Giving Monday
Hello, hello. Thank you for your kind responses to the last letter I sent out. Feeling loved and getting bits of the glinds (happy recognition emotion term from a dear friend) with every unprompted “they.”
This last month, Colleen Wood (a friend I met in Peace Corps, who had the pleasure of sharing some of my most intense Kyrgyzstan moments with—ever hitchhiked in a semi-truck??) and I tried to raise some money for my Kyrgyz friend Gulzat for a project back in my host village of Bakai Ata. It went ok—we raised about half our goal on an auction hosted on Twitter and IG—but we’d like to try to raise the rest today if we can. Let me tell you more.
Gulzat is my age (31) and she’s a single woman with some serious ambitions who decided to stay in the village and take care of her widowed mother and tutor English for young students instead of traveling and pursuing a masters program abroad like she originally intended. It’s rare for someone of her age to be unmarried, and she’s a force to be reckoned with when she decides she’s going to do something (or not). Her work, originally at the library where she also coordinated USAID projects and provided computer literacy education to anyone who came in and wanted to use the library computers, has impacted the village beyond tell—the students she’s taught go on to pursue work as tourism entrepreneurs, medical professionals, translators, and more. And I, as a lonely and inept speaker of Kyrgyz, would not have lasted long in Bakai Ata without her regularly having me over for dinner and gossiping and correcting my Kyrgyz.
She’s now working to expand her tutoring to a brick and mortar small business run out of her own space, so she can accommodate more kids and set her own hours. This is going to be excellent, both for her impact on the community, and for her ability to support herself and her family from her work better.
HOWEVER. She needs technology—a computer (or two) and a projector—to keep working at the pace she’s been used to work at for the last five years. And that’s where our fundraiser comes in.
Gulzat asked me (and I asked Colleen) to try to help her raise 1.5k for her project so she can buy the tech for her tutoring center, and Colleen and I collaborated to gather a host of small business owners and creatives among our friends who were willing to donate goods or services to an auction. There’s a bunch of these offerings that haven’t been claimed yet, and I’ll put the details below, reposting from our IG auction a week or so ago.
If you want to claim one of the items, please reply to this email and tell me your bid! I’ll reply individually at the end of today to announce the winners.
(Colleen is a PhD student at Columbia University—you don’t want to miss this one!)
And this last one is an offering from my sister, Rosie, an expert in the CBD industry in DC. She’s offering a personalized CBD recommendation consultation—she’ll meet with you and assess what you’re looking for out of using CBD and recommend the right blend that will suit your needs. Starting bid is $60.
If you have follow-up questions or just want to donate to Gulzat directly, you can reply to this email.
xo,
Eve