Hey everyone, we have been so lucky for the past 2 weeks to have two great Australian volunteers with us, Justin and Mia!! They have used their skills as a plumber and a graphic designer to help us move the seed room along and create some great promotional material.
You can see from this series of photos that Justin is getting the irrigation set up. We are having some issues with light and with water pressure but we are finally sprouting 8 trays to see how it goes!!!! Justin has been a life saver and so busy I don't even have a pic of him to post!
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| Irrigation tubes running into the trays |
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| Funnels used to drain trays |
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| Drain running out of growing shed |
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| Our new hose and soaking buckets! |
As you know from reading old post we have lost the $450 funding we had to pay the rent and buy a bit of food for the horses so the pressure is on! Fortunately we have a great team of support both in Bolivia and the US and we have been exploring a number of money making ventures.
1.
Expand the Equine Assisted Therapy (EAT) program to paying client/private client. We have begun to offer the EAT privately with a beautiful poster that Mia is in the process of designing.We have 2 new children participating and their parents have been overwhelmed by the effectiveness of the therapy. Once we put a few more touches on the promotional materials we will be visiting doctors who work with children with disabilities to let them know about EAT and its effectiveness. In order to make this a success we need to print posters, business cards and leaflets.
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| Handmade bridles with donated bits. |
2.
Make halters and bridles to sell to other equestrian schools in the area. Jose Luis has done this in the past and it has been very successful. In order to get this moving forward we need a bit of capital to buy the webbing we make the halters from and bits for the bridles. This photo shows you an example of our work.
3.
Use the horses on the weekends for trail riding. There are a number of beautiful spots around Cochabamba for trail riding and in the past the kids have made money to feed the horses by taking folks on weekend trail rides. In order to do this we need to be able to shoe the horses and get a poster (YES Mia is designing more than one) printed advertising the rides.
4.
Finish up the seed room. This will lower food costs by 45%, from $9739 a year to $5322 a difference of $4417. With the latest financial problems it is even more crucial t
hat we get this up and running. Since we last wrote another $150 has come in so we are $700 short of our goal.
So as you can read we are busy and we are trying to become more self sufficient and generate our own funding sources. We do still need donations to help with this so please, if you can hit the donate button DO.
If you want it earmarked for any particular thing just let us know and we will be sure to use the money as you would like. Please pass this on to friends and family if you can it helps us to expand our circle of donors.
Thanks Justin and Mia and all of you for your help and support!
