Welcome to our Newsletter!

This month we have done our newsletter a little differently, today we joined a group of fellow workers for a team exercise where we all had to come up with creative methods of communicating with our supporters. Our little group is show above (left to right: Jim, Steve, Josh, Katey, Helen and Christine).

7-11 MARATHON

Like most things in life it began as a joke...

In our line of work we tend to meet some extraordinary people. Lorencio Mateo is one of them. Lorencio was challenged by some friends one night to see if he could visit all the 7-11’s in Hong Kong, which currently stands at 801. Not one to let a dare go by Lorencio decided he would take the challenge.

Lorencio began his 60 day trek in October of 2007, hitting the areas near the Chinese border first. He battled all forms of public transportation for his marathon, visiting every stop on the MTR and entering into areas of the city he had never before seen.

As he neared the end of his task, he likened the looming finish to a break up, feeling the impending separation from 7-11. He finished the journey in December 2007 with a visit to a 7-11 in Kowloon Tong last, sporting a painted chest displaying the number 801 above the 7-11 logo.

Despite the sometimes silly nature of this venture Lorencio knows that his efforts have impacted Crossroads and the work being done here. He has also motivated friends to take an active role in supporting local charities.

“Anyone as ordinary as I am can change the world and can help the poor by any means as long as they have the determination. I hope that the spirit which came to life from my adventure would continue to shine in the world and change the lives of everyone.”

Lorencio's journey can be seen on his website which features a photo of himself infront of every 7-11. A true man amongst men (he even wrote a song).

Send Someone or Send Yourself

All over our organisation we really need people to come and serve alongside us. There are so many areas in which people are stretched. Instead of the usual long list of people we decided this month the provide a shorter list of those particularly relevant to the areas of the work that we operate:

• Barista: We urgently need someone to run our Silk Road Café. Christy will soon be unable to continue in this role and the Cafe is a vital part of our work that needs to continue. We need someone who loves to make coffee, to love the customers and speak out vision.
• Administration: We urgently need senior administration support for several of our main departments, including Global Hand. Do you know people who love to be organised and are comfortable multi-tracking?
• IT people: We need IT people of all kinds for the complexity of operations here. We need systems administrators and programmers. Due to the relatively steep learning curve neither of these positions are short-term commitments.
• Personal Assistant: With the departure last year of certain staff, we are looking for two Personal Assistants for our Directors. Do you know people who are accurate, comfortable multi-tracking and love administration? We are looking for people who can commit for a year or more.
• Global Hand UK: Our Global Hand office in the UK is in need of an office manager. This could be a full time or part time role.

Not recognise yourself? If you are you interested in coming but cannot see a role above, write to us anyway!

Global Sources

Twice a year in Hong Kong the Global Sources fairs are held. The Global Sources fairs allow manufacturers to meet with buyers from companies all over the world and will often send their representatives to the fair with large number of samples which are often dumped when the fair is closed. Instead dumping these samples, which are often of high quality, a team of volunteers will head out to the Expo centre and scour the enormous venue looking for items which we can ship or give locally.

This particular Global Sources fair we were looking for some very specific items for a new Life X-Perience simulation activity Tom is working on called the Blind X-Perience. The Blind X-Perience involves a particularly large and complicated sound system which needed to be housed within server racks. These racks required were not only large and heavy but also particularly expensive. At the end of the Global Sources we ended up with all the racks we needed and several more that we weren't even looking for! What an MD we have. This provision saved several thousand dollars.

The Global Sources fair is held in two parts. The first part is everything electronic, the second is everything household. Whilst the electronics fair was Tom's playground, Christy had a great time walking up and down the household fair doing what she does best; shopping!

Aside from the great fun we had collecting the goods it was amazing to see the MD's provision, so many fantastic things that will make a real difference to those in need.

Suitability Unveiled

This week we saw a wonderful example of resource matching need in different parts of the world. Our incoming goods department received an offer from a clothing manufacturer of their men’s suits and shirts for donation. We regularly accept a great deal of clothing for our work, but the size of this made it different. The offer was for 10,000 suits and shirt sets! That’s four and a half 40 foot containers; all full of new suits and shirts. Not only that, but if we were able to accept them, the donor had another 10,000 that would soon become available!

One important thing to do was to assess their suitability (!) for the various shapes and sizes of our recipients all over the world so a fashion show was hastily arranged. As you can see from the photos, volunteers from every corner strutted their stuff – Australia, Togo, New Zealand, Sri Lanka... - and proved that these suits and shirts would be welcome just about everywhere.

Suits have been packed and continue to be packed into shipments destined for many deserving causes. Due to the size of the donation we needed another way to disburse this large amount of stock and so we eagerly referred them to Global Hand as it was a perfect opportunity to make the donation available elsewhere around the world. The manufacturer was happy to have the goods offered to the Global Hand community and interest was shown almost immediately. The process is now underway to see those goods reach the hands of people who can distribute it to those they serve.

Part of the agreement with any GH match is that the goods will be thoughtfully distributed with concern for local economies. Devising and fine tuning standards for humanitarian goods distribution is a large and complex aspect of the Global Hand project. The task is so large that we have a full time staff member! It has been exciting to see these sets of standards be received with interest and gratitude by high profile humanitarian groups who tell us that such work is important and long overdue for this industry. Please continue to chat for our Global Hand staff, especially Mikey, as he continues to develop this important work.

Baby

Whilst we cannot see our little one growing it gives us constant reminders that it is alive and well. One of our great joys is sitting on the couch and seeing little hands and feet appear in various places around Christy's stomach. We've been asked a couple of times whether we know what sex the baby will be. We did in fact ask the doctor but he was very unsure when he gave us his answer ("hmmm...errrmmm...might be <blank>...") so we decided that we'd go back to not knowing what we were having. Apologies to all those choosing colours for their knitted booties.

We've been spending some time setting up the baby room and getting ready for baby. Thank you to those who gave us money in the past month for the baby. We went shopping with one of the other mothers on the team who guided us through the bewildering world of baby stores. Sufficient to say we walked away with all things baby related, we are now ready to face whatever lies ahead. The MD has also been providing for us, we've got a nice wooden cot and a heap of good quality baby clothes from the warehouse. It is amazing to see how the MD provides what we could never afford even if we were working in Australia.

Bruno

Bruno continues to grow well. In the past couple of months he has been getting progressively bigger. We have been experimenting with different tank configurations to see which is most pleasing. It appears Bruno is the height of laziness and enjoys enough water in his tank to be able to swim around, but not too deep that he can't eat from the surface without touching the bottom. He also appears to have lost his fear of us, quite happily coming up to greet us when we bring food.

Travels

This month Tom had his first overseas trip. He was sent to a conference of like minded individuals who were exploring the role of information technology within organisations. He had a great time in the mid-west of the US, avoiding cyclones, talking to people from a variety of different cultures and grabbing supplies from Walmart for Christy.

Support

We are extremely grateful to our supporters from both Australia and the US who have allowed us to raise about two-thirds of our support. Last month we had mentioned that with the impending arrival of the baby we have had to raise additional support to cover extra baby expenses. We were amazed at the response and generosity of those who so kindly decided to partner with us in our work. We do have a little further to go to reach our support goals, if you are interested in becoming one of our supporters please see our support page.