2008 Project Smile coming soon

Hi everyone, we are getting ready for Project Smile 2008 at the moment, you can keep up to tabs here with what we will be doing in Mexico this year. We have a new team with new adventure sure to follow. Check back here on November 22nd!

Making Pancakes on the Man Made Mountain

Arriving at the site, David our guide turned and told us that he used to drive down into the site about 400 ft. Now we drive up about the same distance, as the ground has been built up nearly 700 ft. over the past few years. Exiting the vehicle we are met with a strong scent that hits you like a ton of bricks. Our first task is to take our 2 jugs of water and go around giving all the workers something fresh to drink. Our attention is turned towards a fight between a few workers that are competing for something valuable that has just been brought in from the city workers. This isn't an uncommon occurence from what we are told. Our kitchen crew quickly begins to prepare the breakfast/lunch of pancakes and yogourt. We have the locals form a line at the mobile feeding centre and start serving. I take several requests at the front of the line for extra plates, more glasses of water, trying to judge what requests are valid and which are not. After feeding everyone at the top of the hill, we then proceed down, feeding all the children we come across until everything, down to the last pancake and last bit of yogourt is gone. This was without a doubt the area with the most "need" that we visited, in my opinion.

Happy Belated Wednesday

After a long day at Modero and some late night pizza and wine at Freds (the head honcho at La Vina) we missed our posting for Wednesday. I´ll do my best to piece together a long day of events. We started out by heading to Sams (kinda like Costco down here) to pick up groceries to be later handed out in the community. We picked up Corn Oil, Rice, Tomato Sauce and other such ingredients to help stock some of the less than full fridges in Modero. A lot of the kids there do get to eat a fair amount but are a bit malnutritioned because they don´t get much variety in what food they do get. After picking up groceries we headed over to Modero where 4 or 5 of our guys were already there helping dig a trench for the sewage line being layed for the bathrooms we were helping build earlier in the week. After handing out all the groceries and finishing up one more mix of concrete we headed back to La Vina for lunch.

Later in the afternoon we headed back to Modero to serve some desert and hang out with the kids. When we got there the kids were already bouncing off the walls so we were excited to see what would happen when we fed them some coke, cake and cookies. Needless to say this sent them into new levels of horse play and we spent the rest of the night trying to keep the peace. It helped calm them down a bit when we pulled out about 60 Project Smile shirts and got them to fall in line. We then rallied everyone together for a big group shot. Some of the kids got shirts that fit and others looked more like long green robes but they were all equally thankful. After saying our goodbyes and figuring out how to say "see ya next year" in spanish, we piled in back into our yellow bus to head to Freds for pizza.

Over some pepperoni and cheese pizza Fred gave us a bit more background on what some of the greater needs are within some of the specific communities. He also talked about how we´ve helped to make some long term change in places like Modero. How the presence of organizations like the one we´re involved in have helped make a dent in things like prostitution and drug trafficing. We are excited to come to Calgary tomorrow and start to plan towards how we can begin to make a larger impact for next year and the years to come!

Foto explosion

So Project Smile 2007 is slowly winding down, as we just wrapped up our last work day at The Dump. I must say this year has definitely been an exhaustive nine days but also the most wonderful nine days as well. I don't know if it is just us getting old, or us fueling the children with lots of sugar, but boy do do they have endless amounts of energy! But it is this energy that fuels Project Smile and keeps us wanting to come back every year. It is the most rewarding to see the smiles on their faces as cliche as that may sound, but coming from one of the photographers on board this year, it makes for some beautiful opportunities to capture the smiles that we were witness to this year. It saddens us when we leave because we know the happiness that we bring is only temporary and we can only hope that we will leave a lasting impression. Please check out the photos from this year, as many more will be added to the flickr account as soon as we can. Here are a few of my personal favorites from this year, please enjoy!

-Tim

Concrete and Hamburguesas

Today we defined what it means to be a mans man.

The day started out as usual at La Vina, after an early morning breakfast the team packed up the portable kitchen and split up. Those who stayed behind did soft activities like sort donations before heading out to Stone "Island" (it's more of an inlet thing that looks like an island from mazatlans shores) via boat which only takes about 15 minutes. Joel, Ryan, Dan Johanson and myself, Daniel Opden Dries, headed out to the community with Dave in the back of the work truck which is definitely the long way at about an hour and a half commute.

After a few stops for supplies we arrived in the community we would be serving. The rest of the team was waiting in the under construction feeding/education center playing badminton and soccer with some of the local kids.

We were quickly briefed and put to work. About half of the team started up the kitchen while the rest of us began construction.

My first detail followed naturally after unloading the scaffolding we'd travelled with to the site. We set it up in the center which had a second floor poured sometime in the past month or two. Some of the moulds that had been used to pour the second floors cement supports were still stuck to the roof. Our job was to climb two stories of rickety scaffolding tear the large pallet sized moulds down using crowbars. It got pretty intense at times.

After myself and a few others brought some to the ground we moved on and began mixing cement. Since the the community has a boy in a wheelchair they wanted to add a ramp for him to get in. So we got to it, mixing up what felt like 5 tons of cement and helping La Vina's cement master Hosea make the center wheel chair accessible. Pete almost got heatstroke.

Around the time we finished pouring the wheelchair ramp the hamburgers had been cooked and serving was ready to begin. Despite a few line jumpers and the usual antics of the kids things went off without a hitch and everyone left satisfied. We also did the usual candy for garbage trade to get the lunch mess cleaned up. It went well but almost proved to be an to intense a motivator for the kids and we could barely keep up with swarm looking to get a sugar fix.

We got thing settle down, and cleaned up though in the end. By this time it was late in the afternoon and we were all ready to call it a day.

Everyone but Trent and myself headed back to the mainland/hotel via boat. The two of us stayed back with Dave and after a few more heavy, nail studded moulds made clattered to the floor we loaded up the scaffolding and supplies and headed in the truck for our hour and a half journey home.

Foot Tracing for the Special needs School

Lisa here - first-time poster.

Today, a handful of us went to the special needs school to continue the foot tracing. What is foot tracing, you ask? Well, it's exactly what it sounds like: we trace the footprints of a bunch of local kids, so La Vina and their partners can provide new shoes in the right sizes.

There was a much smaller group of children today. 50 attend the school, but only 30 were there today - we found out that a lot of the kids miss school as they tend to be sick more often than not. Their special needs range from Autism and Downs to physical and mental disabilities. The kids were quite playful and excited to see some new faces.

We broke up into groups of 2 and each headed to a class room. The first class Heather and I went into was full of smiles and waves. With one boy named Alfonso sleeping in the corner, it took some coaxing from his teacher to wake him up. A child through and through, not wanting to get up from his nap, he saw us there and pretended to keep sleeping but the smile gave it away. He then got on his knees and continued to sleep with his head on the mat. It made me smile to see that kids are all the same no matter what; they just want to be kids and enjoy their nap and tease us into thinking that they do not know we are there. One of the other classes ran and hugged another team, and the third team got high fives all around.

After returning to the hotel, Heather, Amanda and I went the City Market, which was an event in it self. There were lots of vendors selling everything and they were not shy about helping you find things you wanted - and did not want, in some cases! Talk about customer service.

On a different note, I just wanted to say that this being my first time anywhere outside of Canada and the USA, I am glad that have this opportunity to see life outside of the 'pretty' area. If I had traveled on my own, I never would have seen this side of the Mazatlan. It is a good eye opener for me and I am thankful for all that I have, and that I am able to help like this. Just seeing that La Vina is fighting to make a better life in the colonials is heartwarming.

-Lisa

Day Off = Time to Reflect, Rest, & Sea-Doo

Hi this is Ryan Gill... and this is my first Blogging experience. Exciting stuff!! haha..

Well this is year 3 for me with the Suitcase Interactive team and our initiative Project Smile (www.projectsmile.ca), and the 6th year I have had the priviledge personally to be here to help the poor and impoverished children of Mexico.

As some of you may know, our company has grown considerably in 2007. This has been an amazing ride, and one of the big benifits, besides the obvious benfits of being part of a dynamic growing company, is that with a bigger team this year we are able to accomplish so much more. Triple the amount of work can be done in the same amount of time. The people we are helping down here couldn´t be more happy. We are getting so much done.

As a leadership team we couldn´t be more excited to have such a great bunch of people to work with at Suitcase Interactive, and each of our staff are showing their true colors and it makes me emotional at times to see everyone being so kind spirited and helping these children out with such authenticity. Working long hours but still taking the time to just sit and hang out with the children. It`s quite touching. They just want to help these kids, and they just want to see them *SMILE*

For those that know me well, you know that I like to reminiss. I often get jeered by my good friends because I am always looking back and remembering the good times... its kinda funny when they bug me. But with my friends and business partners Trent, and Joel I really like to think about the stuff we have done, and how that has had an affect on what we are doing now.... And today was one of those days. We had our first day off, and I got to thinking about the early days of Suitcase Interactive, and our beginnings. We said when we started our company, we wanted to make a difference, and that one day we would do something really cool for this world. Hence Project Smile was born out of Suitcase Interactive and we are doing something so cool... and I am so happy to be a part of it!!

I was talking to a tourist here last night and he made an off the cuff comment to me that got me thinking. He said..."it must be great to be rich, so you can do the stuff you are doing"... it kinda made me laugh. None of us down here consider ourselves be "rich".. So...to that comment I thought, there may be some people that think that our group is generous because we are rich. Which probably isn´t the case... however you could make a strong arguement that we are rich compared to the people that we are helping, I think the clear truth is that we are rich because we are generous!

I love being generous. It brings me such contentment, and affects every part of my life in such a positive way. Business, social, spritual, and my personal well being.. It does more for me than making me feel good (the warm fuzzies), its who I am, when i am generous i know i am being everything I was created to be. Some people are born to make people laugh, others are here to counsel people going thru tough times, and those acts are absolutely amazing... but my mission in life is to be generous, and thats why Project Smile was born and thats why we are here, to do my best to live out that personal mission.... and I know my business partners share that same feeling. To be generous to those that have nothing, to give of our time, money and serve the people of Mazatlan. It´s really great!

Like the well know pebble story, where the little stone is dropped in still waters, I feel generosity generates ever-expanding ripples of benefit that move over many layers of society. It produces a virtuous cycle of self-reinforcing benefits. I hope Project Smile impacts you in a way that will encourage you towards action. Be generous, in your way, and see the differnence it can make.

To those reading this blog...Thanks for all your support and for following our team on this journey! Thanks to the team from your leadership. This is "our" trip... and together we are making a difference.