A Plea For Funds to Help Ugandan Youth
Last spring Cassi Gibson showed me photos from her most recent trip to Uganda where she visited East Africa's only skatepark a brilliant hand-crafted concrete setup that started in 2005 as Jackson Mubiru's vision. Jackson wanted to build a place for kids to congregate, compete, feel empowered, and build together. What is so touching about the 50 or so kids that skate the park is the way they smile, create, and express themselves considering only 6 years ago the south of the country was enveloped in civil conflict (the north still remains in conflict.) In June 2009 Cassi & her sister, Nicki, went back to Kampala and brought with them over 200lbs of donated brand new skate gear our friends collected from Sky High Skateshop and NYC area stores, we called the project "Skate & Solidarity."
Jackson hopes to expand the park and build an adjacent school for the kids (there is no pubic school for youth over the age of 12 in Uganda) Without any shops in the region the Kampala skaters rely solely on donations like these. Cassi & Nicki's summer trip was a complete success, so much so that we decided to take a second collection of donations over again in December. Sadly this time British Airways decided that the checked crates would not be allowed to fly from Heathrow to Africa and sent them back. With Nicki & Cassi already on the ground in Uganda this forced us to ship the crates via UPS. We are humbly asking you to help us pay our shipping expenses, specifically, we need to raise $1,700 to pay our UPS bill at the end of the month. You can donate to the project via pay pal below. Please share this message on your blogs & repost it to your networks. Whether it is $10 or $500 every dollar you donate will directly go to help the kids in Uganda.
Thank you always for your help,
Andy Stepanian
Click through the slideshow to see images of the donated gear, photos from Kampala courtesy of Cassi Gibson and BBC photographer Marc Hofer.
