Bienvenue!

Welcome to the blog of Richard Rigby, Jr! Most of you are viewing this in response to the fundraising letters that I sent out for my volunteer trip to Nepal. I would first like to say thank you very much for your help. I will try to keep you updated through this blog as often as possible, but frankly, I don't think I'll be able to access the internet all that often because I will be in a remote village. I will try to send postcards to all of you out of appreciation for your prayers and support.

For those of you who aren't caught up, I am leaving August 29 for Nepal to volunteer teach in a village school for at least 2 months. I return November 29, so I will leave the last few weeks to do some exploring on my own. The education system is pretty bad there right now because it is difficult to get teachers in the remote villages, which are many, and government funding for public education is pretty poor. Ergo, I am raising money and collecting goods for the program that I am volunteering with, Hope & Home (http://www.hopenhome.org). These includes goods such as school books (english grammar, math, health, and science), novels, paper, and pens/pencils. The program also sponsors an orphanage, for which I am also collecting dental hygiene goods, clothes, games, and colouring books.

I am extremely excited for this trip. Having grown up doing a lot of world traveling, I am very interested in different cultures. I studied abroad in New Zealand last year, and I honestly knew next to nothing about the home of the All Blacks before I went (only that there was a course named Cape Kidnappers there, which I wrote a poem about. I'll share it with you sometime). It turned out to be possibly the most wonderful experience of my life thus far. Ergo, I am now interested in doing more world travel and immersing myself in other cultures. When the study abroad program took our group to Tonga (South Pacific, next to Fiji) for a week, we visited a school, and I had so much fun with those children, that I feel that volunteer teaching in Nepal would be a great way to spend some time abroad.