July 2016
Last year, a local artist painted a lovely mural on the outside wall of our orphanage. I drove by every day and took some pictures. A few months later my friend Arjan van der Linde told me about a Dutch school that wanted to donate T-shirts. I thought about the mural and decided to make the T-shirts one of a kind. I sent a picture of a section of the mural and asked to have it printed on the T-shirts. Additional donations from Arjan’s friends helped to add many more. To top it off, Arjan and his lovely family traveled all the way to Ecuador to give every child his/her own T-shirt.
An ocean of smiles and a tornado of hugs and kisses followed. Today (on our weekly English class ) most kids were not there. The caregivers said they were down the street to wave at the president of Ecuador who was passing by on his tour of the coast. I missed the guy by a few minutes, but my heart skipped a beat when I saw the children proudly wearing our T-shirts for the president. I keep pinching myself to be so lucky to have found these incredible little survivors.
July 2018
When something works out really well once, why not do it twice ? But even better….
Arjan van der Linde decided to print a few hundred T-shirts with the logo from his band’s live album and donated the proceeds to our latest project at the orphanage. He even printed a T-shirt for EVERY child, and decided to deliver them in person again. How’s that for an encore ?
Arjan and his wife Carla are co-founders of the MJM foundation. ” We do what we can to help these beautiful children. Their bright smiles are our best reward”.