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| First Raffle Prize- Donated to the Hospice! |
(For those of you wondering why I’ve been so silent on the blogging front, this is why).
Last Friday, with less than 24 hours until our first Family Fun Day fundraiser, I arrived at the hospice to be informed by Pearl, my fabulous co-fundraiser and friend, that Gaborone Parks had double-booked Tsholofelo Park with another Family Fun Day. If you could have seen the expressions on Caroline’s and my faces, you would have thought someone had died.
It seemed that all our hard work over the past two months would be completely undermined. Another church was hosting a Fun Day, without the motive of fundraising. Suddenly the profit we expected to make from selling braai (barbequed meat) would be undercut by the free food from the church group, and we would be lucky if we broke even.
We had barely managed to get any donations of food, and the hospice was unable to free up any funds in time to purchase the necessary ingredients. In a last-minute compromise, we approached Absolute Berlin sausage cart and a few ladies that sell braai around the city during the week at lunch time, and asked them to set up shop for the day for P150 plus P1 for every item sold. This was assuming they would make more than P150 in sales.
Just when we thought things couldn’t get worse, we learned the generator we had booked would not be available until 12 pm on Saturday. No generator, no sound system, no jumping castle. We had been lucky to secure a sound system and DJ from the Holy Cross Cathedral and a sponsor for the castle, but no one had a generator we could use. We were expecting six acts from My Africa Dream (think America’s Got Talent- Botswana-style), but without power, the performances were suddenly nothing but a dream.
We had been monitoring the weather reports, and after a week of dreary, but much needed rain, we knew the prospects for a sunny clear day in the park were limited. And we had yet to obtain a tent. After countless visits and phone calls to police stations and prisons to inquire about borrowing a tent, we were becoming accustomed to hearing all of the tents were booked by funerals and weddings, and we should have called weeks earlier.
In one last attempt, I picked up the phone to my local police station and by some miracle, the woman on the other end said her daughter was enrolled at the Holy Cross Preschool, and that she would ensure we would have a tent, and that we were to come to the station right away.
While Pearl and Caroline took off to pick up the tent, I got on the phone to Gaborone Parks and gave them an earful about why we could not possibly share the park with another Family Fun Day, and how unfair it was that they had neglected to inform us of this arrangement until the day before our event. They took my number and told me they would get back to me. Furious as I was, I continued to cut out over 200 raffle tickets, and hand-number them, and stamp them with the hospice stamp, so as to avoid anyone creating a fraudulent ticket.
With some good fortune, we were able to get the church to move across the street to Tsholofelo Hall, and Mma Rakwadi, the Chairperson of the hospice board of directors, organized the money to pay for the rental of the generator. We were even able to get a giant Coco-cola bottle stall for selling drinks and keeping them cool.
Much to our surprise, Saturday was the most beautiful day we’ve seen in a week, and we were able to pitch the giant tent without any major difficulties.
The acts from My Africa Dream were amazing, our hospice marimba band performed beautiful traditional music throughout the day, whenever there was a gap in the show. When we made the draw for the first prize of the raffle, a kitchen set with microwave, donated by Game, the winner graciously donated it to the hospice, because he felt we could make better use of it!
While our fundraising efforts were met with numerous challenges, we were extremely proud of our hard work, and it turned out to be a beautiful and entertaining day. The experience reminded me that things have a way of working out, and that the pace at which I’m accustomed to working in Canada will cause me to burn out faster, and I must learn to move slower. A successful Fun Day is possible, however we probably could have used another two months to plan.
