Gifts Available!

A pair of hens - £5
By buying hens for a family you will give them a new source of income. Once the hens are laying eggs they can be sold in the markets. Even a new business idea of adding value to the eggs by hard boiling them and selling them to hotels has become a great way of making some extra money.
Also if the eggs are hatched then the family will be able to rear more chickens which can be either used to supply more eggs, be sold as chicks/hens or even eaten for VERY special occasions!


School Shoes - £10
Almost all the primary school children in Kiptere go to school in bare feet. It’s incredible to see them running through the mud with no shoes but this can also lead to problems later as there are many sharp branches and stones that injure them.
When a child goes to secondary school they may be surprised to see that they must wear school shoes.
This gift would be given to the top primary school student in a very rural interior school and would enable them to feel proud when joining Secondary School in January.



Football - £10
Kids everywhere love football but it seems to me that Kenyan children love it more than most! I have been training around 60 Under 14 year old boys and have formed two teams from different villages. In January we want to expand this to all the primary schools in the area and also to form girls teams to join a league of their own.
The challenge is the ball… Kids here make their own footballs from plastic bags filled with sand or grass.
We would love to be able to present each football team with their very own ball for practice.


Back to School Kit – £10
In Kenya the school year starts in January. Primary education is free but the children must provide books, pens and mathematics sets for themselves.
This gift will give a child
New books for each subject they take,
Full set of stationary,
Oxford Mathematics set
And a new school bag so that they can start their next school year fully prepared and ready to learn.


A lamp and Paraffin – £5
In the villages around Kiptere there is no electricity and so at night it is very very dark. By giving the gift of light to a family you will enable the children to do their homework comfortably, mum to cook the Ugali and Sukuma Wiki (staple food here) without chopping off any fingers and dad to read his newspaper in peace.
Light is valued very highly here but it is also very difficult to come by, this gift will definitely light up the lives of a family for may years to come.
Alternative: Battery powered rechargeable lamp - £5
A lamp which can last for 2-3 nights and that can be taken to the village and charged for 10p. A brighter light and causes less pollution than burning a paraffin lamp.


A giant thermos - £5
Do you like tea?
Kiptere is in the middle of the tea plantations in Kericho district. So here we like a LOT of tea. When someone comes to visit in your home the tea must be there ready waiting for them. It’s rude for a visitor to drink less than two cups of tea!
The only way to do that is with a thermos.
Also Kenyans have very big families and when you have to make tea for 10 children who might arrive from school at different times looking for something hot to warm them up (since it rains every afternoon here!)… The thermos must be ready!
This gift would bring a smile to the face of the mum knowing that the ‘Chai’ is always hot and ready when it’s needed.

Wellies - £5
Those of you who have ever been to Soul Survivor Festivals in the UK will know that those 5 days in Somerset can be the wettest of the year. Wellies are now an essential item of the kit list.
In Kiptere it rains EVERY afternoon (Not an exaggeration!).
Imagine a place where there is no tarmac and every one traipses through the mud to get anywhere. Imagine a place where there is no washing machine to get the mud out of your clothes.
Here wellies are not only necessary for farmers but for anyone who wants to go anywhere. It can take a very long time to get anywhere if you are picking through the mud in your best shoes for the office.
This gift would be hugely appreciated by the receiver since they will be able to get from one place to another with ease.


Computer Training Course - £30
Youth within the rural areas very rarely even see a computer let alone know what to do with it. In this fast moving world it is essential for them to start learning about technology so that they can get ahead.
This computer training course is run locally by international volunteers and gives a subsidised course in computer proficiency that enables young people to gain basic skills with word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and databases.
This gift will be used to partially sponsor three students to take the computer course. We believe that it is better for someone to contribute something towards their future development rather than just supplying everything each time.
By partially sponsoring the students they will take more ownership of their learning than if we paid the fees completely.
This will enable more people to benefit from your gift rather than fully sponsoring only one individual.

One year’s school fees - £200
A child in secondary school has the continued fear that at any time the school bursar is going to send them home for school fess. This is not only embarrassing for the student but also causes them to miss perhaps even two weeks of school while their parents search for the money to send them back.
These school fees will go to a child joining Form 2 (second year of secondary school) who was the top student in his school during his Kenya Certificate of Primary Education in 2009. This year he has been sent home from school very many times but has always ensured that he caught up on the work missed and he will proceed to his second year in boarding school in January.
This gift will relieve the pressure on not only the parents but the student as well since he can then sit in class assured that he is not going to be sent home at any moment.


Toys for a Child - £5
Kids here who are still too young to go to school tend to roam around the fields looking for something to do.
Of course one thing they love to do is to play. There are no toys here so they usually make do with whatever they can find. This could be something as safe as a bicycle tyre or as dangerous as a broken bottle.
Your gift would give a child some safe toys to play with together with their friends.



Football Kits - £100
For those of you who really love ‘The Beautiful Game’ and would like to bring smiles to the faces of a whole Under 14’s team, perhaps you could consider sponsoring a set of football kits.
We would love to sponsor two sets of kits so that whenever any of our Under 14 teams play in local and district competitions they can look as professional as the way they play the game. At least if they have uniforms then the referees will know who is off side, usually half of the team, half of the time!
If you choose this gift you can even decide on the colour of the shirts and shorts.



Family Luxuries for One Month - £25
A family in Kiptere never go to visit the nearest town of Kericho.
Kiptere shops only hold the most basic of items for survival. We would like to be able to present some families with a Christmas Hamper of things that we would consider the basics for making life comfortable that they would never afford.
This ‘luxury’ Hamper will contain:
2 kg Sugar
2 kg of Rice
2 kg Flour for making Chapatti
2 kg Washing powder
Bar soap for washing (They use this soap for everything from washing the children to washing the dishes!)
Wire wool for scrubbing the pots and pans
A large tub of Vaseline (It’s used like a skin protector and everyone in the family uses it each day)
2 Large loaves of bread
1 kg of margarine
A tin of jam
2 litres of juice concentrate
A box of biscuits
A family sized sponge cake
1 litre of paraffin
A large tub of Royco (spice used in ALL cooking)
A large tub of drinking chocolate (so there is some alternative to tea!)
Salt
2 kg cooking fat
2 litres of soda (something that kids here only dream about when they see people drinking Coca Cola in Kiptere)
Toilet roll (less said about this one the better!)
Toothpaste
Anything else you would like to specifically suggest!



How to buy a gift –
This might be a little bit of a complicated process but please bear with me, It will be worth it in the end!

Step 1: Choose your gift
Step 2: Payment
Deposit directly into the account.
You can do this either by online transfer or by visiting a Lloyds TSB Bank.
Laura Griffin
Lloyds TSB
Account Number: 77-07-05
Sort Code: 21727168

If you can add a reference to the payment to tell me your contact email and what you are buying that would be great!

Step 3: Contact me for confirmation
Once you have deposited/transferred the cost of your gift then PLEASE contact me as soon as possible so that I can give you confirmation that your gift is going ahead.
It’s very important to get in touch as soon as you can so that I can get started on processing your gift.

When you contact me please send the following information:
Full Name:
Address in UK:
Gift Type:
Any extra information: (You can specify even what kind of person you would like to receive your gift/Colours of football kit/Even colour of your hens!)
If you would like to write a letter to be given with your gift then please attach it here.



Contact Details:
THE BEST WAY IS EITHER TO EMAIL ME OR TO SEND ME A TEXT MESSAGE TO THE KENYAN NUMBER BELOW.

Email – griffin_laura@hotmail.co.uk
Phone – +254 7121 55 704 (In Kenya)
You can also call my parents in Coventry if you have any issues and they will try to help.
+44 2476 616656
Post – 120 Gleneagles Rd, Wyken, Coventry, CV2 3BD.
Then it will be forwarded to me by email.
(If you are sending by post please take into consideration the time of posting. I realise we are running out of time before Christmas so I would hate for you to miss out because of the postal system!)

Step 4: Sit back and wait for your gift.
Once you have followed this process it is now up to me to do the work on the ground here.
I will search out the best person for your gift.
I will ensure that whatever it is you have purchased will be bought and presented to the person who is most in need of it.
I can guarantee that whatever you decided on will be bought and the money will not be used for any other purpose than that you have chosen.


It should take approximately 3 weeks for the whole process to be complete from you confirming with me that you have bought a gift, to you receiving you card, story of your recipient and photographs.

Deadline for buying gifts: Monday 20th December!!!!