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Pennies for Haiti

Pennies raised to help feed children a hot lunch at school in Haiti. Photo: Jonathan Bailey

October 29, 2012

By Simon Chambers

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Christ Church Cathedral in Montreal has helped PWRDF’s school feeding program in Haiti by gathering over 60,000 pennies for the cause!  Since the Canadian government announced the discontinuation of the penny in 2012, PWRDF has been encouraging parishes to gather “Pennies from Heaven” to support the work of PWRDF around the world.  The children of Christ Church Cathedral have responded!

Here is a story about their work from their blog, written by Jonathan Bailey:

At our 5th Sunday service on Sunday 30th September we celebrated the culmination of our Sunday School Summer Appeal. The appeal was to collect pennies to pay towards hot school lunches for elementary school children in Haiti. This programme is called Appetite for Learning, or in the local language, Appeti pou Appran, and is run by PWRDF, which is the Canadian Anglican response for emergency relief, refugees, development, and justice.

Back in June during Sunday School we learned about children in Haiti, and our children made special Penny Piggy Banks from recycled food containers (some pictured here), which they gave to adults in the congregation so they could collect their pennies for the appeal too.

The wonderful news is that our Sunday School Appeal for Haiti raised over $600!  Now that is an awful lot of pennies, and during the 5th Sunday service we gave some examples of just how many pennies that is.

At our Haiti Penny Party the previous day we had drawn outlines around the children’s bodies and then covered the outlines with pennies. This child’s outline needed 250 pennies. It was really 246, but we added on 4 buttons which conveniently rounded it up to 250!  $600 is enough pennies to make outlines like this of  240 children!

For those of you who prefer to think in terms of weight, one of our children weighs 30lbs, which is the same as 6,000 pennies weigh. $600 in pennies is equivalent in weight to more than 100 of this child!

And to put this amount of pennies into a real context, PWRDF tell us it costs $50 to feed one child for a whole year, so the appeal raised enough to feed 12 children a healthy hot meal every day at school for a whole year. And that’s really going to make a difference to these children’s education and their chances in life.

A big thank you to all who helped the Sunday School raise this incredible total.

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