Wine to Water, CNN Heroes

On my trip to Uganda, Africa last year I had so many amazing experiences and opportunities. One of these was meeting a man named Doc Hendley. Doc started an organization called Wine to Water. He raises money by hosting wine tasting benefits, and then uses that money to supply the means for clean water throughout the world. 

Yesterday Doc was selected as a CNN Hero! CLICK HERE to watch the video and hear Doc explain what he does, in his own words.  He has such a great story and does incredible work for Darfur, Cambodia and Uganda, just to name a few.

It is so exciting to see Doc on national TV, what he has been doing is so amazing and now to have so many people see him on CNN…. no words, I am so excited to see what doors this will open for, not only Wine to Water, but for the people around the world that will be affected.

If you want to see more go to Wine to Water, for pictures, projects they’re working on, and ways to help… Doc even has a Twitter.

I also linked them on my side bar.

 

Doc building a well in Ethiopia…

Year End is killing my blog…

Year end at the office is a crazy time for me. I have had to concentrate solely on work, not even a normal lunch break! Anyway, my blogging life will be back to normal very soon, I hope. Until then here is a little update…

 

*Xmas was awesome, I got to spend some great quality time with most of my family.  Kenny and I got Manduka yoga mats, which are like the Mazerati of yoga mats. Super exciting!  We got a lot of things we needed and a few added suprises like a salt rock air purifier from Nicole and Peter and gift cards for 1 hour of foot reflexology… Good times!

 

*New Years was alot of fun, even though our plans ended up falling through. We started the night with a few friends playing a game of Settlers of Catan, yeah…. for 6 hours! We ended up missing our friends block party because we were so in to the game. We bought it the other day and have been playing it so much that for a couple of nights I was dreaming about different stratagies… Bad I know.

 

*Reading – I have been reading a lot lately, this is great because it’s my favorite thing to do. I just finished the first two of the Left Behind series which I LOVED. Now I’ve moved on to the Twilight series, I like it a lot and I love Edward. The only thing that I find a bit irritating is that in certain situations the writer seems to overdo it a bit, it ends up being hard to picture the event. Other than that, it’s great!

 

*Uganda- On Christmas day there was rebel attack in Northern Uganda, not far from where I was in September. 400 villagers were killed and some children were ubducted, it’s painful to think about. It’s not a war, it’s literally men with guns and machetes coming into a village of farmers and… I don’t even know.  I can only pray for those killed, hurt, ubducted and those who were left with no one to care for them. (if you want to do some research Google the “LRA” or “Lord’s Resistance Army” or “Joseph Kony”)

That’s it for now, I’ll post as soon as I can finish my Year End stuff. Later!

Uganda Pictures

I went to Uganda, Africa in September with 6 other people from my church. We worked with a Organization called Connect Africa and met Doc, who runs Wine to Water. They both provide the means for clean drinking water for locals. More details to come. Anyway I just started organizing the 2000+ pictures from the trip and eventually I will post all of my favorites, here is one to start. This was taken by my friend Val while we were on a “tour” of COTN farm land. COTN stands for Children of the Nations, which is another org that we almost went with before we found Connect Africa. It is a great organization that takes in the “worst of the worse” cases, orphans and such. These are some local girls(?), I think there were some boys in skirts but it’s hard to tell. As our bus would drive through different areas groups of kids would come running along the side pointing and yelling “Muzungu” (white person). Well these were some of those kids, when they saw that the bus was stopping they all came over and followed us on out little tour of the field. They loved seeing pictures of themselves and it’s funny because they’d be all smiles yelling “You take!” Then as soon as you hold the camera up, the smiles are gone and they get all straight faced, haha they just didn’t know to smile for the picture. So I have probably 200 pics of a bunch of solemn looking kids, with the exception of a few that figured out that I was telling them to “smile”. All of the kids are gorgeous by the way, all of them, and so happy. It was really uplifting. Enjoy, more to come soon.