WINTER
Our year started with a programmatic funding trip to Peru. This was a trip we had been planning for some time and was initially put in motion by one of our Board Members, Immouna Ephrem. TFI sent two staff members to Peru in January, and over the course of three weeks, they visited with 11 different programs of which we decided to fund the work of six. Many of the programs we visited worked with and continue to work with impoverished women and children. Some of the women have become impoverished as a result of domestic violence while the children were impoverished either as a result of abandonment or simply because they happen to live in a family that had little or no income. One organization that we funded was Sagrada Familia. They work with over 700 children who have spent much of their lives rummaging through garbage dumps in the hopes to find something they could sell or recycle to get through another day. This school gives them a chance at a better life.
SPRING
In March, some of TFI's staff assisted in the packing of $1.5 million wort
h of supplies to Haiti after an earthquake created widespread devastation. This shipment was organized by another of our Board Members, Diane Eskenazi of Peace Builders, Inc. It was our pleasure to help. Sending shipments of needed goods around the world is something TFI tries to do every year. In 2009, we not only packed supplies headed for needy individuals in India, but we also delivered them.
Later in the Spring we spent a considerable amount of time planning for the first l eg of our Living on A Dollar A Day project. This , of course, is a project whereby we are documenting the lives of people around the world who live on a dollar a day. The first leg of our tr
ip involved sending our photojournalist, Renée Byer, and videographer, George Rosenfeld, to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, and Cambodia. Performing background research, acquiring guides and translators, and deciding on the stories that we wished to feature took months of preparation. Later in the summer we also sent our team to Ghana and Liberia. We have now covered six of the ten countries we hope to visit before this project enters its layout and publication phase. This photo captures the life of a young man in India, who because of his caste, is relegated to cleaning out sewers filled with human feces by hand in the city of New Delhi. This is how he earns a dollar a day.
SUMMER
Over the summe
r, as part of our Fellows Program, we again sent an Intern to India to work with the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy. Their office is located in the foothills of the Himalayas in Dharamsala. Our Fellows who work with NGOs around the world are required to stay for a minimum o f two months, and if they accomplish their work with us, we pay for half of their travel and living expenses over the course of their stay. This year Jeffery Kaloustian was our Fellow in India. While the re, he wrote and published a human rights report about the recent detentions of Tibetan artists and intellectuals in China. The photo is of Jeff discussing his work with the Director of the Centre, Mr. Urgen Tenzin. (Photo by David Huang)
Also, in the Summer of 2010, Professor Tom Nazario, the Forgotten In
ternational's Founder, went to India to visit with several of the organizations we fund there and check in on their work and progress. While there, he made three grants to organizations we have long worked with which continue to serve the poorest of the poor. These grants made up three of the 15 grants we made this year. Here is Professor Nazario with some of the children we try to help. They live in a pocket slum in the Kangra Valley in Northern India and receive support from the Tong-Len Charitable Trust.
FALL
In the early Fall, our staff spent some time organizing a small fundraiser at the Westin Hotel in Palo Alto. This was done in conjunction with the fact that TFI would again be hosting the Dalai Lama when he visited the Bay Area in October. At the reception, many of our friends, who also would participate in a variety of events in and around the Dalai Lama's visit, came and spent an evening with us. The event itself was co-hosted by Michael and Holly Depatie, and attended by Lee and Diane Brandenburg, two of TFI's major donors and close friends of our organization. That evening we raised some funds towards our continuing efforts to support various projects around the world, all of which are aimed at lifting the poorest of the poor out of poverty, particularly women and children.
More recently we were quite busy working with the U.S. State Department, the Dalai Lama's staff, and other organizers in the Bay Area in hosting His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, while he was with us. The Dalai Lama works with us primarily because he believes that our mission in helping the poor demonstrates compassion for those who often have so little and suffer so much. It is work he encourages us all to do around the world. Luckily he's been a friend of ours since we started TFI and continues to help us in our work. This year, we took His Holiness to two venues. At a middle school in East Palo Alto, he spoke to young people about the challenges they may face in the future and how they might wish to get involved to possibly make the world a more compassionate and better place. Students also asked His Holiness 10 questions, all of which were quite thoughtful and made for an enjoyable learning experience. The students also presented a gift to His Holiness for visiting their school (pictured). (Photo by Henry Chang)
We also took His Holiness to Ronald McDonald House in Palo Alto where 
he blessed some 50 critically ill children who were waiting to see him with their families. His Holiness learned that some had put off their operations because they knew he was coming that day. He hugged many of them much like a parent would hug their child. Little did the children know how rare it is to be this close to the Dalai Lama. For them, they appreciated that he had come to visit with them, and for us, it was a way of demonstrating to the world, through His Holiness's kind actions, that we must all take some time from our busy lives to care for those less fortunate. Hopefully the children and their families will remember their day with the Dalai Lama as they continue to battle their life-threatening illnesses. (Photo by Renee Byer)
Finally, this year we also launched our new website (www.theforgottenintl.org), a Facebook site, an online newsletter, and a fledgling blog (http://theforgottenintl.wordpress.com/). We plan to continue to improve and expand our online presence to try to reach even more caring individuals around the world in the years ahead. Thank you for following our work thus far. We hope for another eventful and productive year in 2011, so stay tuned....
