Saturday

Saturday, February 2

Last night I (Ruth) stayed at Shelley’s again.  Mark had to get up very early this morning to travel with his school’s basketball team to Susa (1 ½ hrs. away) so he went to bed.  Shelley, Sarah and I played a card game that they taught me called Trash.  It was a lot of fun and Sarah beat both of us.  We got to sleep in a little longer today as we didn’t have to leave to set up for the garage sale until 8:30.  The garage sale will be from 1 – 5 this afternoon.  The teachers will be running a couple of games for the kids and the newly formed Parent’s Association will be running a food booth.  This is the first event the Parent’s Assoc. is sponsoring.

We got to school about 9:00 am and started to set up.  The clothes are all in large bags at the church so Eddy, Carrie’s dad Howard and one of the dad’s from school headed over there to get them.  We started to set up two rooms that the garage sale will be in.  The desks all needed to be carried out and since we don’t have any tables we used the wood that divides the office into two parts and laid it across some desks.  It hasn’t been reinstalled yet so it worked great.  They arrived with the clothes and hoisted the bags through the classroom window.  We got to work setting out piles of neatly folded and separated clothes.  We had a room for children’s clothes and a room for adult’s clothes and the prices were set reasonably enough to entice buyers.  By 12:30 we were putting on the finishing touches and were hoping for a good turn out.  The weather was sunny and warm and no rain was predicted.  In the DR when it rains often times kids don’t even show up for school because they depend on motorcycles for transportation.   

At one o'clock I (Karen) rang the bell and the sale began! The parents came and they brought their family and neighbors. It was a great turnout!  The large tables always had ladies lined around them. People were buying a lot of clothes, but the clothes piles never seemed to get smaller. In order to try to get rid of more clothes, we decided to have a 2 for 1 sale staring at 3:30. We had signs stating this up on the walls. During the afternoon word spread about the "2 for 1" sale. We noticed ladies sorting with arms full of clothes and even standing just waiting for 3:30. This was going to be a problem. So at 3:20 Shelley had to explain that they had to either pay for what they had in their arms or put them back on the table. They did and the staff helped us refold all the clothes on the tables. Then they were let back in and the digging started all over again!

At 5:00 the teachers helped up bag the clothes up and they were given to the several of the sister churches in the community. The churches will use these for their needy families.

The money was collected and counted and the profit from the first Parents Association fundraiser was just over $40,000 pesos or $1000 US dollars. What a great success!