Kiva loan July 2011

I was delighted to be able to make a second loan through Kiva yesterday.  With so many wonderful people asking for a little help it can be hard to pick just one, so the way I do it is to find a person and story that speak to me.  I know it's not scientific, but I've always found that the only decisions I regret are when I don't follow my gut.  I really do believe that the eyes are the windows of the soul, even when you can only see them through a photo and when I saw Anthony's, I felt an immediate connection and am honored to be able to support him.

Antony Ndirangu has practiced farming in Ndunyu Njeru town in Kenya for the last 11 years. He is 44 years old, married to Mirriam and they have five school-going children. He's a great example of how these microloans through Kiva change lives: Antony hopes to become a leading farmer in his area, and is working towards this steadily with our help. He has had 3 loans previously and repaid them all as agreed, so it was an easy decision to support him in his request to buy a dairy cow to boost his farming income. 

Here is the receipt for that donation:

This has been one of the best organizations I've ever donated to.  If you'd like to help others help themselves, I encourage you to check out www.kiva.org for yourself. 

Thank you to my customers for your support of my little Etsy shops, and therefore your support of people like Antony.

Capturing a screenshot

Having just made another Kiva loan, I wanted to copy the receipt to display here.  Easy thought I.  Not at all!  The receipt had been emailed to me and I wanted to copy the whole thing and that required taking a screenshot, pasting it to 'Paint' then removing the private link to my account, 'snipping' the receipt and saving it in jpeg to my 'documents' - phew!

To a slightly less than expert techy, this proved quite the challenge.  I use Windows and here's how I did it:

Press ALT and Prt Sc - this copies the screen (in my case an email)
Open 'Paint' by pressing Start > Accessories > Paint
Press Ctrl + V - this pastes the graphics file into Paint
Click the little pink eraser and 'rub' out any private information (account details for example)
Open the 'snipping' tool by pressing Start > Accessories > Snipping
Press 'new' then put the '+' in the top left corner
Press the left mouse whilst moving the '+' to the right, then down
You'll see the info you've snipped quite easily as it's in focus (the rest is blurred out)
Save to a folder of your choice remembering to save it in JPEG format from the dropdown menu

And that's all there is to it!

You can see the result of this effort in the next post which is about the latest Kiva loan made to a Kenyan farmer to buy a dairy cow. 

Eco Friendly Cards

Gosh, where did the time go.  It's been two months since I posted a blog and a lots happened! 

I was worn out in April and took a break from everything prior to a trip to Europe to recharge our batteries.  We visited family and friends before heading to Switzerland for a week.  We'd planned to hike in the mountains and stop off along the train route at cities we'd never visited before heading down to the Matterhorn, but unfortunately a bacterial infection made us both so sick that we couldn't do much more than lie in bed and look at the fabulous view out of the windows.  We love Switzerland no matter the weather or our health, so if you're going to be ill, that's the place to do it for us and we had a wonderful time in spite of things.

Once we were home again, I was laid low for 3 more weeks but emerged full of enthusiasm to make my new shop 'Eco Friendly Cards' as full and gorgeous as can be.  I've been working hard on it ever since and now have 116 handmade cards for sale as of today ... phew! 

I've been investigating making a light box as I'm having trouble with shadows, so that's my project for the next week and I'll blog on it shortly.

In the meantime, the latest update as far as charitable donations is that I have $12.50 set aside towards the next Kiva microloan - that's halfway there, so my goal before the end of June is to have raised the rest and made one donation if not two!

Train ride from Interlaken to Grindelwald in the Bernese Oberland