Elderly Couple Won’t Give Up In The Battle To Give Kids An Education

March 22, 2009 - PRLog -- Taking a derelict property, with panoramic views of Erakor Lagoon, an elderly, hard working Australian couple renovated and built it into a small successful boutique holiday resort, over a period of three years. Now they face the battle of trying to give the million dollar property away.

They formed the unconventional concept of placing the property on the Internet as a raffle. They simply wanted to give all the money away to provide high school education grants for local kids, who will never have the opportunity to get an education, without outside assistance. Many of their parents are not able to read or write and live on under $1 a day. In this Lesser Developed South Pacific Country, voted the Happiest Country on Earth, there is no free education system. Government statistics reveal the shocking numbers that only 18 percent of the local children get to high school level. 55 percent manage to get to level 6, but 26 percent never receive any form of education at all.

The project sounded easy and so attainable. Wrong! First there was the world-wide financial crisis. This caused the merchant bank they required to process credit cards online, to close shop. Other banks were approached but they wouldn’t even consider handling this kind of Internet project in the present financial climate. Particularly as the project was located on a tropical island, in the South Pacific, that just happened to be a tax haven.
The ministers from the local government all agreed it was a fantastic idea, but bureaucracy had its own say and added to the couple’s difficulties, as they battled to register a charity. The elderly couple was adamant that all the money be held firmly in trust, controlled and oversighted by a board of well known local business people and well respected citizens. This would sustain the project allowing many kids to benefit from it, now and in the years ahead.

Adamantly determined not to quit on this worthwhile project, the couple paid to have two websites built, from their rapidly diminishing cash reserves. Only to discover the web sites were nothing more than templated blog sites, with very limited capabilities. Still refusing to give up, the wife made the decision to enter the highly complicated and competitive world of Cyber Space. With no more than just two hours tuition, she tacked the problem of learning how to drive the professional web builder’s program, Dreamweaver. A lot more grey hairs and numerous hours later, the web sites were online.

Interviewed by freelance journalists, the couple were terribly disappointed to find that popular magazines and TV stations simply said, “You aren’t Nicole Kidman or some other well known celebrity.” The couple approached one or two visiting celebrities to the tropical island, in an attempt to get them interested in the project, but always with the same result. “Yes, they would love to help,” when talking to the couple face to face. Yet as the weeks dragged painfully by, nothing.

Still firmly believing wholeheartedly in their project, in spite of some close friends telling them it was time to quit, the couple enrolled the first student into high school in January, 2009.

Now the couple have to just wait and see if their eighteen months of hard work, blood, sweat and tears will bring its reward. Will users of cyber space back them? Will some lucky person get to be the new owner of this fantastic million dollar property for only a few dollars? Or will the couple have to finally give the project away, through lack of support and general skepticism in believing something this good could possibly be true? Will high achieving students be left abandoned without any opportunity to ever get a high school education, or fulfill their dreams?

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YouMe Support Foundation is a non-profit charity, raising funds for non-repayable higher-education grants for geographically and financially disadvantaged children.