Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.

I have managed to talk 3 good friends of mine into accompanying me on a tough bike ride from Paris to London, approximately 225 miles in 3 days, which is an average of 75 miles per day. We will be leaving the UK late pm on Wednesday 23 May to start cycling back from the Eiffel Tower Thursday morning and, fingers crossed, will arrive in London on Saturday afternoon ready to set up for the London Spring Toy Show! The team consists of Tom Hodgkins, Ron Brawer, Jon Elliott and I. We will be travelling light, with only what we can carry on our backs and the bikes so it’s going to be really challenging.

One website describes people doing this challenge as being ‘crazy if you’re not in peak physical fitness’, luckily we are ……… !

So, why are we doing this? Back in July 2011 I decided to take my family on a trip to the Masai Mara in Kenya. It was a truly amazing trip, but it highlighted just how much we take education & schools for our children for granted, even the simple things like books, pencils and paper are hard to come by but essential for these children to learn and help them to a better way of life.

The local community are doing all they can to educate their children but they need help, lots of help, and that’s where we come in….

Our plan is to:

1). Upgrade and rebuild Nkiloriti School so that children as young as 6 won’t have to walk 6km to the larger 8 roomed school at Ngabolo every day (it is not uncommon for these children to encounter elephants, leopards, hyenas and packs of wild dogs during this journey).

2). Provide funding for 2 years salaries for two early years trained nursery teachers at Nkiloriti School including training for them.

3). Currently the children (some as young as 6) walk to and from Ngabolo School every day. We want to build a boarding facility with beds, kitchen/dining facilities, toilets, washing facilities and solar power at the school so that these children can stay there all week to greatly reduce the threat of animal attacks, especially the elephants who killed a mother and two young children in a neighbouring village in 2011.

4). We want to provide furnished classrooms to the children at Parkuruk School and Narasha Nursery who currently learn under a tree.

6). S’ingaun Nursery is in a remote village that is like going back 500 years in time. It’s a day’s walk to the nearest water and back, and the mothers do this trek twice a week with their donkeys. We would like to provide them with some sort of water storage system / pump to help with this task.

We have the North Downs, the South Downs, and the Parisian traffic to deal with but thankfully no wild animals !

Any donation no matter how small would be greatly appreciated. Obviously the larger the better as it will make the pain and exhaustion worth it!

Thanks very much,

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