As Project Japale Goune wraps up for this school year, we have been tallying final figures and realized that we have served about 10,000 meals each year!
Who would have thought, when we started this project four years ago, that we would get this far? Thank you to all our donors for making it possible.

Another exciting factoid is that we have reduced the cost of lunches considerably since we began, and that 10,000th lunch cost only $0.49! Because the school is contributing nearly half of the project’s cost, that means that feeding a student one lunch now only costs us $0.25.

We are grateful to have made it this far and to be able to continue to do this work.

Congratulations to our partner school, L’Ecole Primaire de Point E2, for their recent recognition from the President of Senegal. After a commission visited the school, they were selected to be the recipient of 30 IBM computers in the school, all of which will be connected to the internet.

This is not only a great honor, but a seed of opportunity: the school is looking into the feasibility of opening up as a Cyber Cafe in the evenings to generate some income to fund the lunch program.

GREAT WORK and FELICITATIONS! We are lucky to have such a successful partner school.

As 2007 begins, we can celebrate the three year anniversary of Project Japale Goune! While there was not a definite starting date to our project (we were working on Senegalese time, after all) it was around the beginning of the year that we realized our initial appeal to friends and family was more successful that we could have imagined. That started us on the long, great path towards where we are today: feeding over 200 hungry students lunch each week!

THANK YOU to all of our donors, particularly those of you who believed in us before we could believe in ourselves, for helping make Project Japale Goune possible.

Just a quick note to say thank you to all of our donors who have given online recently! We just launched the option to send donations through our website (via PayPal) and have had tremendous success!

For those of you who are interested in making a year end gift, consider making one online! We will still accept other forms of gifts too – we just want to offer as many options as possible.

There is a nice article about Project Japale Goune in the October issue of Reconnections, a magazine for Rotary Foundation Alumni. It describes the beginning of the project;

The sight of children in tattered clothes living with
their parents in a tent in Senegal inspired three U.S.
Rotary Foundation Scholars — Katie Krueger, Ling Ling
Phung, and Natalie Domond — to start a school lunch
program for underprivileged students there in 2003.

You can read it entirely online here: Reconnections