Capital District CKI Spreads Literacy World-Wide!
by Sneha Bhat, Capital District CKI Governor

The Capital District of CKI has recently published an anthology of children's stories, called Helping Hands: an Anthology of Children's Stories, to help raise money for our District Fundraising Initiative. For this Fundraising Initiative, CDCKI is also teaming up with Students Helping Honduras (a non-profit organization dedicated to creating projects for, raising awareness of, and fundraising for Honduras) to use all of the profits from anthology sales, fundraisers, and donations to build the very first public library in the San Francisco de Opalaca region of Honduras!

The municipality in the department of Intibuca (in which San Francisco de Opalaca is located), Honduras, currently has a 90% illiteracy rate among children and adults. This statistic can be attributed to the fact that this underdeveloped town has a limited number of schools, with none going higher than the ninth grade, and this region has never had a library. The San Francisco de Opalaca Library will be the first public library in the entire southwestern region of Honduras, and having this library built would be the first step to helping provide the villagers with the means to further develop their literacy skills. Since this is such an important skill, improving the literacy rate of the town would be the start of a domino effect, leading to the overall improvement in the quality of life of the impoverished state of Opalaca.

You and your Kiwanis Club can help us reach our goal of $10,000 needed to build and fully furnish this library by ordering a copy of the Helping Hands anthology today, or making a donation to help us reach our fundraising efforts. We are currently about a quarter of the way to reaching this goal.

Helping Hands is a compilation of stories written by children about the joys of helping others. Each story shows how a little love and kindness can go a long way. The cost of each copy is $15.00 (USD). All of the profits of book sales go towards this project, so your purchase will really make a difference!

You can now order your very own copy of the book online here: http://www.cafepress.com/cdcki. Otherwise, if you would like to order in bulk (fifteen copies or more in one order), you can place an order through the CDCKI web site here: http://www.cdcki.org/events/Helping_Hands.htm!

If you are not interested in ordering an anthology, but you still want to help with this project, donations of any amount are also accepted and greatly appreciated. For more information on this project, please visit the CDCKI web site at the link listed above!