Pounding Pavement

I just returned last night from Escondido, where my sister Sandy tried our first attempt at raising money for HANDS by signing up for one of those restaurant fund-raiser events. The deal goes, you sign up for a day and time, print up flyers for the business and your organization, and then your nonprofit gets a certain percentage of the sales made during that time. For us, the place was a fish taco chain called Rubios and we were getting 20% of the sales made. The twist came when we showed up to hand out our flyers and were told we actually had to stay so many yards away from the restaurant, distributing our flyers to those potential (as opposed to those who already were coming in to eat fish tacos anyways) customers. "But I thought the idea was to help our nonprofit make money..."no, actually, the idea is to drum up business for the place hosting this type of event. They in turn give you a small percentage of the sales during those hours. Ummm-after hours walking in circles around Big Box store parking lots, handing out flyers we had spent our money on to promote our "cause" (and the place of fish taco eating)-I was beginning to feel like parking my weary self at a Rubio's outdoor table and eating a few fish tacos myself-paid for and presented with a flyer for the 20% donation, of course. All in all, it was a fun day because my loyal sisters: Sandy, Katy and Patty, nephew Jake and his friend Tiffany and her children all helped out in the spirit of promoting our school being built half way around the world. It was good to talk to strangers in parking lots who were also interested in hearing what we were trying to do. It was good to see the smiles and also see people carry our flyers inside as they went to order their fish tacos, HANDS in their hands. We ended up making something like $75 that will go into the HANDS account. That's about $6,000 in Nepali rubees! And that will go a long ways towards building material...