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Family - Colleagues - Friends

Dear Family, Colleagues and Friends,

I am writing to see if you can help me get a very exciting and worthwhile venture off the ground.

As you may know, I am the founder and director of the Children’s World Charity, which since 1982 has been providing educational, creative and social benefits to children in the West Country, with particular emphasis on children who have special needs. In 1999, because we wanted to take performances, workshops and play activities to the children of Kosovo after the war, we set up a sister charity, Children’s World International so that we would be able to work outside the United Kingdom. Please see our web page www.childrensworldcharity.org to discover more about the work of both charities.

Anyway, now, in the wake of the Tsunami, we desperately want to take the performances, workshops and play activities that proved so useful in Kosovo, to the children affected by the Tsunami, and we are planning a 4-month Tour to run September-December 2005 in Sri Lanka (hopefully to be followed by further tours to different areas such as Indonesia in 2006).

I enclose a letter, background notes and the estimated £18,000 budget for the September-December Tour, which will show you in more detail what we are planning. We believe that this in an innovative, exciting and very economical way to provide some much-needed fun and enjoyment for these traumatised children.

But I am actually writing to you now to elicit more immediate help. An opportunity has just arisen for the Clown (our main CWI performer/workshop leader) and me to visit Sri Lanka for a Mini-Play Tour and reconnaissance/fact-finding/contact-making tour in March.

A very kind Sri Lankan man we have made contact with is offering to travel with us in Sri Lanka and introduce us to various people and organisations who will be able to help us. It makes sense to undertake this Mini-Tour now if humanly possible, from many different points of view: We will be able to ascertain the situation far better on the ground, we can investigate different areas and decide where the September-December team should be based for at least their first 2 months in the country, we can make direct contact with both Sri Lankan and foreign charities who are already doing work on the ground with children, and make arrangements for our team to work with their children this autumn, etc. We will also be able to run mini-taster-sessions for children (obviously nothing like as good as the 4-person Tour which will be there from September, but at least the Clown can perform, I can run beanbag making-workshops, The Clown can run catching games and juggling workshops, I can run badge-making workshops and we can run large-scale participative parachute games, etc.) We will be able to keep a day-to-day diary and put this and photographs up on our web page, and this will hopefully elicit donations for the Autumn Tour. We will also hopefully get some press coverage in Sri Lanka so that organisations out there, who are already working with children on the ground, can get in contact with us and request that the CWI team visit them in the Autumn.

Due to other pressures of work, I am only going to be able to remain in Sri Lanka between 5th-15th March, but it looks as though the Clown will be able to stay until the end of March and continue offering small-scale performances, workshops and play activities to children once I have had to return to England. (We will probably be spending at least 3 days in Trincomalee and then the rest of my time in Galle and the South, with the Clown undertaking some work in the East of the island after I have left until the end of the month.)

The flights for the 2 of us will not cost more than £1,000 and we estimate that the living expenses for me for 10 days and the Clown for 25 days will not be more than a further £1,000. You will see in the enclosed information that Children’s World International already has £2,200 in hand from our own fundraising activities, and that £5,000 will be given to us by Michael Eavis after the Glastonbury Festival in June. So theoretically we could spend the £2,200 we currently have, but that is ideally committed to the Autumn Tour, and I am loath to use it for this first mini-Tour unless absolutely necessary. Neither the Clown nor I will be taking any wages during this trip, but we cannot afford to cover our travel and living costs ourselves (normally I would be happy to pay my own flight and expenses, but at the moment simply cannot afford to do so, and nor can the Clown). Rather than deplete Children’s World International’s income for the September-December Tour, I am asking whether any of you would be prepared to make a donation towards the £2,000 needed for the March Mini-Tour. Any amount, however small, would be most welcome. If you can help, please send a cheque made out to Children’s World International to 2, St. Edmund?s Cottages, Bovetown, Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE. Donors will all be credited on our web page, which will have the diary and photographs of the trip placed on them as the trip progresses. Any money raised in excess of the amount needed for the March Mini-Tour will be saved and used for the far bigger September-December Tour.

I know that performance, workshops and play activities may sound frivolous in the face of the devastation that the children of Sri Lanka have suffered (between 35,000 and 50,000 people have died in Sri Lanka, and more than 500,000 are still homeless), but we know from our experiences in Kosovo how important things of this nature are, when people are trying to rebuild their lives. There needs to be some fun and some laughter - they provide much-needed light at the end of a long, dark tunnel and give some hope for the future. Many of Children’s World International’s performances and activities will be for families, not just children, as shared laughter can really help families look to the future. So many parents and grandparents came up to me in Kosovo with tears in their eyes, saying things like, “Thank you so much - I never thought the day would come when I saw my child smile again - you have given us hope!”

This preliminary trip will instantly work with largish numbers of children and will also gain us immensely useful contacts that will make the September-December Tour more efficient and more successful, thus benefiting more children. I hate hounding people I know for money, but I do so hope that you will be able to help.

With very best wishes,







Arabella Churchill,
Director,
Children’s World International.