Paying with Paypal

Attention sponsors,
As you may know, there is an option to make your sponsorship payments online via the "Donate" link on our website's homepage (khnkp.org). Doing so is quite simple and best of all, you do not need an account with paypal to use their payment services.

1. Visit khnkp.org and scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the "Donate" button. You will be directed to KHNK's paypal site.
2. You will be asked to enter the amount you would like to pay. Please enter the amount the amount you owe for your sponsorship at that time (ie. $100 if you pay yearly, $24 if you pay every three months, etc). Click the "Update Total" button.
3. Farther down the page, you will see the words "Don't have a paypal account?" along with icons of major credit cards. Click "Continue". You will be redirected to a page where you can enter you credit card number and contact information. At the end you will also be asked for your e-mail address to which your receipt can be sent.
4. Click submit once to complete the payment process.

If you have further questions, please do not hesistate to call or e-maill us.

November Sponsors Meeting Success!

We are very pleased with the turnout of our Sponsors Meeting on Saturday, November 15th. We warmly welcome our two new sponsors, Mrs. Kristina Palmer, and Ms. Shari Davis to membership with Kids Helping Needy Kids! A variety of topics were discussed at the meeting, including fundraising, expansion, and Christmas care packages for the 2008 holiday season.
Sponsors: Please e-mail us to let us know if you did not receive a copy of the meeting minutes, which were recently sent out through e-mail.

Our next meeting will be on December 27th, 2008. This will be our biggest meeting of the year! We will be assembling the Christmas care packages and volunteers are always needed, as we will be organizing all the donations we receive into packages ready to ship to Ethiopia.

Bring a friend! We can always use extra help on care package assembly days. See you on the 27th!

NOVEMBER SPONSORS MEETING!!!

We are pleased to announce the next Kids Helping Needy Kids Sponsors Meeting will be held in November!

We are very excited about seeing all of our sponsors again, and updating all of you on what is new with Kids Helping Needy Kids.

Date: Saturday, November 15th, 2008
Time: 4:00pm

This will be an important meeting. We hope to see you in November!

Several "FINAL NOTICE"s Have Been Sent

One of the things we dread doing the most here at Kids Helping Needy Kids is telling a sponsored child that their sponsorship has been terminated. Summer is a time where many people relax, go on vacation, check their e-mail only sporadically, and, as a result, we are facing a record high of "absentee" sponsors! Please take the time today to check if your latest payment has been made. If you check our website, you will see that sponsors now have the option of conveniently making secure payments online through PayPal. We need your help, sponsors! To those who of you who consistently and faithfully make your payments, we extend our warmest thanks, on behalf of those children in Ethiopia we are all working to serve. To those of you who know you have a bit of catching up to do, we understand that we are recuperating from the looseness of summer, but please take the opportunity to make your payments today. We want to do our best to decrease the number on our waiting list, not watch those numbers rise.

As usual, sponsors are desperately needed. If you know anyone who is interested in sponsoring, tell them to check out our website, call us, or e-mail us! We appreciate your help. Together we hope to make a difference, and DECREASE the amount of children on our waiting list!

A Very Important "Thank You"

This month, we would like to offer a special thank you to the 5th and 6th grade girls Sunday school class at Woodstream church. These girls have faithfully been contributing their spare change to benefit Kids Helping Needy Kids and best of took the initiative to collect it. Last week, their total donations amounted to over $60. Their act of love proves that no donation is too small. Special thanks to their teacher, Mrs. Kristina Palmer for organizing their efforts.

Motivation and Rewards

Along with the letters we receive form each sponsor child each month comes a copy of the latest report card. We have been keeping track of progress and improvements and feel it is time to reward and encourage some stellar performances. Effective August 2008, KHNK will send Certificates of Achievement to students who excel academically to recognize such High Achievers. The only criteria for the award (given once a year) is that the student consistently rank in the among the top ten students in their grade. The following students awarded in the inaugural "High Achievers" class: Selamawit Getachew, Eskedar Mulualem, Asnaku Bizuneh, Bemnet Edegaline, and Samrawit Misaganaw. Classes range in size of about 40 to 60 students and the rank takes all subjects into account, so this is no small feat! Congratulations guys!!

There are a few reasons why KHNK believes it is necessary to reward the children who excel in the classroom. The most important of these is to stress the importance of a wholesome education. The 63 Birr ($8) sent to the sponsored kids each month, when put to good use can be used to pay for school-related expenses like uniforms or the minimal but mandatory school fees. Most of the parents of our sponsored children tell us that their child now has the opportunity to attend school. Families can also use the money to buy food or other necessities. In short, there isn't much emphasis on education among the poor in Ethiopia. If children are in school for most of the day, they can't help out around the house all that much. Who will help with the laundry, making the injera, making dinner, selling items to generate income, and the other exhaustive, time-consuming tasks performed daily? In some instances, before KHNK began assisting, children raised by single or disabled parents or grandparents (in general, guardians unable to work) had to beg on the streets in order to live. Dozens of grateful children in are now benefiting from the opportunity to continue their education. It's amazing what a few dollars and a few encouraging words can do for not only the children we sponsor, but for their relatives as well.

It is important to note that Kids Helping Needy Kids is not here to solely to give out money and clothes. We expect cooperation and improvements from the children and their families and proof that the help they receive is being appreciated. One way to do this is to monitor their academic success so those who excel will be rewarded. As we all know from experience, receiving a reward for good work strengthens our performance and propels us forward, especially when it comes to school. We hope to further the message that education is extremely important to improving national development but also to raising standards of living. An education also fulfills individual aspirations and broadens one's horizons; children in Ethiopia have dreams of becoming something better, just like every other child in the world.

Brand New Website Feature

Attention everyone,
The new Paypal feature on khnkp.org allows form anyone to make a donation to our organization. Using Paypal is quick, super easy, and best of all free. All you need to do is click on the link and input an amount of your choosing. Donations can be made both with and without a Paypal account so no extra usernames and passwords are necessary! As always, many thanks to our sponsors and other supporters.

Why do We Care Anyway?

As you may already know, Kids Helping Needy Kids facilitates sponsorships. But this is only one of our projects to help children in Ethiopia. We also support 63 orphans in a part of the country called Debre Libanos. During our visit in 2006, we asked the children what they needed, and they replied food, clothes, and shoes- in that order. Their humble requests are beyond reasonable; these are necessities that any living being should have access to, especially food!

God-willing, we will return to Ethiopia in summer 2009. Our goal for next summer is to try to make this orphanage self-sufficient when it comes to food- the first item on their list. We are thinking of starting a vegetable garden of simple crops that will grow in the conditions given. Tending to the garden is a responsibilty everyone can be given and the rewards will be tasty. Gardening together will foster a sense of both community and accomplishment.

An outdoor bread oven would be another great asset to the orphanage. Once given instruction and practice baking, the older children can prepare dozens of loaves of bread per day and no child would go to bed hungry. As you may have seen our photos of the children there, most of them are skinny and short for their respective ages. Look at the picture posted here on our blog. In such places where adequate food and nutrition are hard to come by, the sight of undernourished children is not uncommon. A great source of protein is peanut butter, a staple condiment in many American households. In Ethiopia, peanut butter on bread would fill bellies with minimum cost or preparation.

A water well outfitted with a filter would also be ideal for promoting healthier living at the Debre Libanos orhanage. Clean water is another fact of life that we here in the U.S. take for granted. Immediate access to drinkable water would be nothing short of a miracle there.

These are just a few of the ideas that Kids Helping Needy Kids has for improving the overall quality of life for the children at the Debre Libanos orphage. Stay tuned for updates on our ideas for next summer's projects. We'd love to hear from you too. Please leave comments with your ideas or suugestions.

Learn about World Hunger

Poverty.com is a moving website dedicated to informing citizens of this world about a phenomenon that kills innocent thousands of men, women, and children each day--hunger. Not many of us living in developed countries can say that we've ever gone without adequate food for days let alone weeks. In fact, the United States is atempting to tackle obesity and other potentially life-threatening conditions such as diabetes. But isn't chronic hunger just as deadly, if not more! We were please to stumble across this site and we urge you to visit it and read about the big problems plaguing underdeveloped countries (AIDS, TB, pneumonia, etc). The information is very well presented and keot short for busy people like you and I!
Even more interactive is poverty.com's sister site, freerice.com. Here you can play a fun game to strengthen your vocabulary while donating rice through the UN World Food program. The site's creators are committed to both providing free vocabulary to anyone who plays and rice for the impoverished.

Come to Beltsville Day and Support KHNK!

This Sunday, May 18th, Kids Helping Needy Kids will be running a fundraiser! This will be our first fundraiser since last summer, when we hosted our Second Annual Barbecue. As usual, 100% of the proceeds will go directly to aid underprivileged children in Ethiopia. On Sunday, members and volunteers will be running an information table and selling refreshments at "Beltsville Day", a festival at the Beltsville Community Center in Beltsville, MD. Sponsors: We hope to see you there!!

Greetings

Welcome to the blog of Kids Helping Needy Kids, a nonprofit organization designed to aid underprivileged in Ethiopia. Check this site regularly for updates about our organization. If you like what you see here and want to get involeved, please visit our website, khnkp.org!