Steve Burton and I (Sylvia Gardiner) plan a visit to Ethiopia in April this year at our own personal expense. We will be visiting the LUCIA projects and you can read more details about the trip below. But first, we'd like to ask you for your help. We'd like to take some supplies to the projects. If you can offer any of the following, please contact us.

• Pens and pencils
• Children's books (light weight)
• Nice clean children's and women's clothing
• Two working laptop computers

We will be visiting women's ‘Self Help' groups, a kindergarten, and the man-made dam in Sebeta which supports the villagers in the area with water. Our second planned field trip will be to visit Wolliso where the SWDA have started a new project which is supported by the Finnish Embassy. The project ‘Livelihood improvement through urban agriculture for destitute mothers' supports 86 women in income generating activities such as beekeeping, vegetable production and sheep/goat rearing . Included in the project are 50 orphaned children and 20 women infected with HIV/AIDS who get economic support.

In the past few years LUCIA has supported orphaned girls ageing from 3-18. The parents of the girls died from HIV/AIDS and they had no family or caring support until they came into the project. They now have three meals a day, a roof over their heads, medical care, education, school uniforms, pencils and books. We plan to meet and talk to the orphaned girls in Addis Ababa and hopefully photograph and film their stories.

LUCIA has also made donations to 'Little Voice' a Canadian NGO (non-governmental organisation) which runs a house in Addis Ababa for street children. We will take time out to re-visit some of the friends (children) we made on our last trip.

The visit will take us about ten days in a country that boasts 13 months of sun. We've found the people we've met, on previous visits to be warm, kind, generous (when they have so little) and beautiful. We are both looking forward to the visit immensely.