The Beginning

If you're reading this you probably know all about why I'm leaving on Saturday. You know about Hostel Hoff, the Majengo Clinic, Path to Africa and the awesome fundraising parties thrown by Hans Bier Haus. So I'm not going to retell the story of why I decided to spend my summer volunteering in darkest Africa, or why I chose Tanzania in particular, but rather I'd like to start with the fundraising success Roxy and I had while preparing for our trip.

So a long time ago before I was a medical student I was a real person, and as a real person I had hobbies. One of these hobbies was riding and training horses, and my equestrian trainer Heidi just happens to be a professional fundraiser. So once I decided I wanted to travel to Moshi, volunteer in an HIV clinic and help Path to Africa power a borehole to provide local children with clean water I knew exactly who to call. With Heidi's guidance I started a huge social media movement to get people excited about our trip. I have since used Facebook Twitter and (archaically) email to spread the word. Luckily I have some pretty cool family and friends, and we raised 40% of the money in a few weeks.

I knew I was running out of people to heckle for cash, and my medical school classmates were getting progressively more jaded and apathetic about awesome causes, so Roxy and I decided to do something unique. Our friends at Hans Bier Haus are into supporting great causes and offered to put their beer on sale for us. We brought a ridiculous amount of flyers, a few pitchers and set up begging the bar goers like a group of friendly, more well dressed hobos. The results are below.

So these are my friends Katy and Kendra enjoying their cheap beers.

 This is me and Roxy and Mat who set up our whole fundraiser and also happens to be a poet.

This is me and our flyer and Robbie. We're not 100% sure what he does.

Me and Frox.

Hans is famous for their bocce ball court, here being enjoyed by my dog Butters and his favorite person Jay.

Now we have 60% of our $6000 goal (thats $3500 ish) and we're pretty stoked about how well we've done so far. Since we're leaving on Saturday afternoon, most of the promoting will happen from our hostel in Tanzania. Hopefully reading about the trip and volunteering on this blog will help us get the last $2500! Hooray for putting med school summers to good use.

Oh and if you want to check out our fundraising website with the full story you can do so here.

Later. M.