Sara Rummage, Nina Ottinger, and Helen Derryberry are listening to our Blessing Hands proposals. Helen is my old college roomate from my days at David Lipscomb College in Nashville. It was Helen who forwarded Blessing Hands information to Sara Rummage. Sara wrote and asked me questions about Blessing Hands which I delightedly answered. Only later did I realize that she was from a foundation and had a reason to be asking questions in such detail. When she told me her board was meeting and would consider funding Blessing Hands, I said to myself, "What board is she talking about. " I looked at the information at the end of her e-mail, and only then did I find that she was from Founding Family Charitable Foundation (FFCF). I was going to see my father in two weeks and would pass through Nashville, so I made arrangements to stop by and give them our proposals for helping the children in Yangshuo and Qinzhou with tuition.
I taught middle school teachers in a summer English camp in Qinzhou in 2004 for four weeks. Many of the teachers there give from their meager salaries to help the countryside children at their schools who need money for tuition. The children there need tuition help in the higher grades just like they do in Yangshuo. Ann Liu, who was the director of that summer camp, came to Morehead State University to be a visiting scholar in the fall of 2005. I asked her to help me include the countryside children of Qinzhou, Guangxi, China in the proposal as well as the Yangshuo children. Her wisdom, knowledge, and friendship was invaluable in drawing up the Founding Family proposal.
