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Each year, the Cosmopolitan Club organizes a Thanksgiving Benefit Dinner whose proceeds are donated to an organization with specific needs. Past projects have donated funds locally to WEFT Public Radio, Matthew House, and the Woman's Fund and internationally to fund projects such as aiding flood victims in India and hurricane victims in Mexico, books for a rural school in Zambia and high school scholarships for rural children in Romania. This year we are raising funds to help at least six children in Quito, Ecuador, who are good at school but who need help with financing their education. Some of the children are orphans; however most of them have families
but cannot stay with them due to various reasons, such as abuse, family
problems, and/or poverty. For this reason they live in a lodging house
located in the northern part of Quito that is operated by two trustable
and dedicated nuns. The girls who live there are between 7-17 years old.
The governmental Department of Social Affairs helps out with $0.55 a day
per person for food if they have money enough to spare. Attending school
is free, but each child needs about $200 a year to be able to continue
their schooling. That amount pays the school registration fee, the obligatory
school uniform, as well as the necessary educational material (books and
note pads, writing utensils, uniform for physical education class, etc.). Cosmo is not alone in trying to help educate these children. The Ecuadorian
Students Association at the U of I held a Craft Sale at the University
YMCA on November 15 to raise money for the project and has been meeting
with the Cosmo Club Executive Director to plan other fund-raising efforts.
This turns our project into a joint effort between Cosmo, the Ecuadorian
Students Association, and the Association of Scandinavian Women in Ecuador,
who will administer the money raised, and each sponsor will get financial
reports, as well as copies of the children's grade books. In fact, the
project was first proposed by Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, who is originally
from Sweden and lived at the Cosmopolitan Club while in graduate school
at UIUC. Right now Cecilia is on leave in Quito, Ecuador's capital, where she is going to stay for a bit more than a year. When Cecilia proposed the project, she expressed concern about the poverty, corruption, and discrepancies between rich and poor which were present in the every-day life of Ecuadorian inhabitants. Wanting to help remedy the problems she saw, she became involved in charity through the Association of Scandinavian Women in Ecuador (ADE) founded in 1975. This association is run by women originally from Scandinavia or wives of Scandinavian men living in Quito, and in their activities they combine enjoyment with serious work. They have prioritized helping children and adolescents. As in many other countries, in Ecuador education is the only way to
get out of poverty and help the country develop. By participating in this
project, Cosmo unites with people from northern Europe and Ecuador to
live its motto "Above all nations is humanity" and help as many
other people as it can. For more information about the project, please
feel free to visit the Cosmo website or call or email Andrea Shields,
the Club's Executive Director at: |