27th October 2007

Dear Mr. Chan,

We were so happy and proud of the picture which appeared on your homepage (the one on which you hold our donation from our Day of Calligraphy in your hand). We’re already planning a new Day of Calligraphy event at the end of this year. But in the meantime we are still busy collecting money for ‘Build a School for a Dollar’.
We bought twenty-five kilos of white marble stones in a building center and carried them home. Then we washed some of them and Ingrid wrote ten different Chinese characters (like love, health, eternity, luck, long life, …) on the stones. We put them together with a paper (with the meaning of it, how you can draw it yourself and the pronunciation in Chinese) into a small bag and sell them for one euro per stone. It’s not easy to write on this kind of stones because sometimes the ink goes other ways than you want it to go!
We sell the stones on meetings of our association. We even sold them at Children’s University. This is a project which is quite popular in Germany. It offers children between eight and twelve years the possibility to attend a lecture for children six times a year. They learn things like ‘Why are there rich and poor people in the world?” or “Why do we need a police?” and “Why are atoms so small?”. The professors give always great lectures and it’s fun for everyone. Our association is one of three partners who organize this event. One partner is the university, another one our local newspaper and the third one are we! It’s fun and interesting for everyone.
There are always a lot of children who buy stones but also several who sell the stones. Every stone sold is one stone for the school in China. You could also say ‘Build a School - stone by stone’! We want to thank everyone who bought and sold stones, children and parents and Ingrid’s colleagues at work who bought over thirty stones.
We want to send you a lot of greetings from all the members of our association, who like the ‘Build a School for a Dollar’ - project much. We hope we can send you more money, once we sold more stones. But someday everyone around us will have our stones and by then we’ll have to find a new way of collecting money!

Lots of greetings,

Anouk & Ingrid Ehreiser,

on behalf of ‘Initiative zur Foerderung hochbegabter Kinder e. V.’