I belong to a group of families who are making up care packages to send to a group of soldiers currently serving in Iraq. We are all donating items, and getting support from companies such as biscuit manufacturers, chocolate makers etc, just so the men know they're not forgotten and they can enjoy a few little luxuries while they're over there. I don't think it's exactly "comfort city".
We are planning on putting together a CD of beading designs, and selling it for $5 to as many people we can. A similar CD with scrapbooking layouts ( for a different charity) sold 1500 CD's - being inexpensive, people were very willing to support it. However, to do this, we need designs to put on it. They need to be original, as we respect copyright, and we have permission to use some designs already. If anybody is interested in contributing a design to this project, I'd love to receive them by email with a photo and instructions saved in pdf format. I'm very happy to have either an email address and/or url in the pdf with the instructions, so you can have your website or contact details seen by many people.
If this is for real (and Roseanne, I'm sorry if you are for real and are insulted by this, but we have been burned before), I'd be more than willing to donate the few totally original designs I've got. Anything to help the men and women over there, although my heart clenches when I write "men and women." C'mon, these are kids - many are only a little older than Manda. She has a hard time finding her keys every day, and cried that she was injured after the wind blew my wheelchair into her at zero mph. I have a hard time seeing our soldiers as anything but kids like mine - scared, convinced they are adults, and needing their mamas when there are scary noises in the night.
BTW, and sorry to piggyback on your post Roseanne, another way to provide comfort and a few warm pats on the back to kids who might feel forgotten as they toil on the other side of the world is by buying a gift at
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Manda, Bob and I sponsor a different soldier every month (whoever has been waiting the longest for a package), and we try to get everything on that particular soldier's wish list.
The people there have gone through all the government imposed hoops to allow gifts to soldiers sent by people they don't know - apparently, there are loads of rules and regulations. (you former military folks can stop laughing at me now) One example I can remember is that many of the kids were requesting jerky - which the powers that be had not been able to provide, due to local sensitivities (most commercially -made jerky is made from beef or pork.) The people at TfT found a source of Elk (?) Jerky, and also Turkey Jerky, which is also keeping TfT from decimating the local elk population.
As I said, we do this once a month. Other families could do this yearly, or form a group with someone else, whatever works for you. We haven't gotten many thank-you notes, which rankled until I remembered how fun and easy it is to get Manda to write notes. The one note we received (9 months later!) made it totally worthwhile. Our random pick that month was a young woman, serving overseas in a tent environment. (You don't get a lot more info than that, in order to protect the soldier's safety)
She thanked us for the package, which had all the goodies she wanted, in quantities large enough to share. It arrived right around her birthday, which had been a hard one with no presents. Her family couldn't afford to send a bunch of care packages to her, which i believe is a common situation in today's military service. After all, you don't see many rich kids deployed n Iraq.
So, Roseanne, it looks like a lot of the hard stuff has been taken care of for you. You could do the CD fund raiser thing, and then donate the money raised to an organization like Treats for Troops.
Best of luck, and say a prayer for these kids, whether you support this war or not.
Kathy N-V
On Wed, 3 Jan 2007 2:47:49 -0500, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote (in message ):
Not insulted at all, it's a fair enough comment. I guess you don't know me from Adam and I don't quite know how I can prove my credibility, except to say hang on for a while, we're gettng a lot of positive feedback and when I have something concrete to show, rather than just an idea, I'll repost.
I know what you mean about the age of the troops, I look at my tousle haired 5 year old son and wonder if in 15- 20 years he'll be in a place like that.
I didn't know about treatsfortroops.com, thanks for pointing it out. Only thing is we're Aussies and there's nothing like that for our Aussie boys, might end up starting a site like that one ourselves.
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