"Wells of Love" globe featured
at the Artist Bazaar in December

Every donation and event counts at Amman Imman. We get REALLY HAPPY when schools tell us about their projects for the Azawak. At several points during the 2013-2014 school year we were honored with a donation from Five Oaks Academy, a Montessori school in South Carolina. In total for 2014, Five Oaks raised $5,482.49, an exceptional amount that will go towards helping our friends in the Azawak!  

An example of a bracelet
made by a student
to help the Azawak

$203 came from a pizza fund collected by Upper Elementary students. $481 came from an Artist Bazaar in which the students made special crafts to sell as a part of their homework. This Artist Bazaar parallels some of the activities that help the people of the Azawak sustain themselves: they make handcrafts to sell so that their earned sum can go toward making better lives for themselves, their families, and their communities. The rest of the money that Five Oak raised, a whopping $4,798.49, was all collected when they held their own Amman-a-thon in May. Individual donations from students and parents added to the total as well.

Five Oaks annual Amman-a-thon, 2014

This is a fabulous development for Amman Imman and the people of the Azawak. As we expand into more communities in West Africa, we require more and more money to, not only create boreholes for the sake of a clean and permanent water source, but to make sure that these communities are then able to sustain themselves and, hopefully, raise themselves out of poverty with our assistance. Five Oaks’ contribution will help us immensely with this task. Thank you so much, students, teachers, and families of Five Oaks Academy, we endlessly appreciate your contribution this year (and in past years), and look forward to continuing our relationship for many years to come!

Contributed by Tina Burchette, Amman Imman volunteer

The kind of support we receive at Amman Imman varies from one-time donations and events to continuous assistance from groups and schools. We love it when we can encourage schools to not only hold events, but to teach the students how to be Heroes of Compassion by learning about the people of the Azawak and the struggles they face. 

In 2012, teacher Jessie Bradley connected the students at Caughman Road Elementary in South Carolina to our Wells of Love program. Five Montessori classrooms at Caughman led the way, raising awareness among their peers in 15 additional regular education classrooms.The entire school participated, ages 4 - 11. 

Adam grows fruit in his garden

in the Azawak village of Kijigari, where programs from AI help improve living conditions.

The Montessori students worked very hard to raise funds leading many activities to inform the community and engage them in taking action. To begin their awareness-raising efforts, the children took home information to their parents, and the staff members were informed of the program as well. They set up a personal fundraising page where the parents and staff could donate directly to the school’s cause. This was a fantastic precursor to what they planned next: they used an already existing school activity, the Harvest Festival, to hold a bake sale for Amman Imman. This is a perfect example of how easy it can be to incorporate humanitarian efforts into everyday school activities! 

Through both individual donations from parents/staff and the bake sale held at the Harvest Festival, the students at Caughman Road raised $940.00, a significant sum! This money, received in 2014, will assist in our programs and efforts being made in the Azawak region by Amman Imman, such as providing mosquito nets to villages, supporting the women’s cooperatives, and building new boreholes in other communities in the region.

Thank you very much for your contribution, Caughman Road Elementary, and we hope that you will continue to support us and our friends in the Azawak!