Funnel Cake Fundraising

So, in case my teaching job didn't take up enough of my time I decided a couple of months ago to become the president of a local non-governmental organization called Avanoa Tutusa. This translates roughly into "Equal Opportunities" and was started by a group of Peace Corps volunteers about 6 years ago targeted at providing opportunities for women and children in Samoa. The organization is comprised mainly of Peace Corps volunteers although we would really like to make it more locally sustainable, particularly since our terms of service here are of such a temporary nature. At this point all of our programs are focused on children- we do a big career day each year at the beginning of the school year (I wrote about it last February). We hold one in Upolu, this island, and one on the other island, Savaii. We also provide grants for art supplies for preschools in rural areas where there is no access to consumable supplies. We are working hard to expand the organization and become involved in more events on a regular basis. As part of this we have decided to develop a new program of doing craft and sports days where we bring a whole bunch of equipment and supplies out into rural villages to have a big fun day with all of the children. We had one a few months back and it was amazingly successful so we are looking forward to making it a more regular occurence. We're also looking to get involved in a youth camp that is put on by the Ministry of Youth here and hopefully this will happen in the coming year. The long and the short is that we're trying to be able to provide resources without actually having an income of our own, so we survive mainly off of fundraising. So this past week was the annual Samoan cultural celebration, the Teuila Festival. This consists of lots of parades, singing and dancing competitions, and tons of booths with food and handicrafts and anything one could want to find in this country. So Avanoa Tutusa held a booth where we sold funnel cakes to make money to support our programs. The Samoans totally loved them and we were cooking nonstop from early monday morning until late friday afternoon. We sold well over 1000 funnel cakes and ended up making a really great amount of money that we can use for a bunch of upcoming projects. It was tiring work but really fun and a great break and change from teaching for the week (NUS was on mid-semester break). I have to say I'm not interested in looking at another funnel cake for a long long time but fortunately for me we seem to be the only funnel cake vendors in the country which leaves me safe until next year.