Carry A Bit More

Our Mission:  “Cardz for Kidz! is an organization dedicated to uplifting the spirits of hospitalized and/or traumatized children across the globe by delivering inspiring homemade cards!”

 ….ACROSS THE GLOBE….this blog post is dedicated to that portion of our mission statement. As touched on in a prior blog post, Both Inside and Out, we’ve been shipping cards to MANY countries. For example, in August, we sent cards to children in the Oncology and Neurology floors at the National Institute of Pediatrics (INP) in Mexico City and to the pediatric patients at Living Word Hospital in Aba, Nigeria.

To be honest, from what we heard we sparked a slight disagreement at Living Word! J That location is a school for children and has a hospital which serves pediatric patients ranging from babies to adolescents. The head of the hospital took us on a tour and first we delivered some Happy Birthday cards to several of the newborn babies.

Later we went to deliver some cards to other pediatric patients. 

We provided a total of 70 cards and told them they could deliver them to new patients when they arrive. Later we walked with the head of the hospital and met with the director of the school - the school WANTED some cards for their students too. Unfortunately for her, the hospital claimed dibs and were NOT going to give up their cards. We promised the school we’d bring another batch soon.

Usually, we have to ship all of our cards to the hospitals. In fact, we recently held a fundraiser, Pledge Allegiance, in order to raise funds to help with our shipping fees. Can you imagine the cost of shipping cards to Mexico AND Nigeria? How confident are you that big packages would successfully make it to hospitals in those countries? That’s a lot to worry about. Thankfully, we didn’t have to! It helps to have connections - Dr. Adiele Nwankwo and Rebeca Gutiérrez took a total of 120 cards in their carry-ons with them during their international trips. We are grateful for their help.

Quick favor. Take a look at our website, www.cardzforkidz.org and click on the map and drag it over to left to see the special smile images. Those 4 destinations in Africa were all hand delivered . In addition,  for our cards to Haiti, we send the cards to a hospital in Florida and their staff take them ontheir next trip to Haiti.

Now we can say we’ve delivered cards to 7 different countries and that’s primarily driven by people delivering the cards during their trips.

If you go back to the map on our homepage you’ll find an image of hospitals/shelters in the USA, Haiti, Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, and Mexico.  We know what you’re thinking, “that’s only 6 countries and 6 is less than 7.” For some background, a friend volunteered to take a set of cards with them during their trip to Colombia. Their tour guide highlighted how there was a hospital near his house and how those would be perfect. Unfortunately, we were unable to get a hold of him to find the name of the hospital. So we know the country and area, but since we don’t know the EXACT hospital we didn’t include it – 100% open and honest.

We’re consistently trying to reach kids across the globe. So during your next international trip, please let us know if you can CARRY A BIT MORE in your carry on bag!

#CarryABitMore #UpliftingSpirits

To see more pictures and stories please check out our website www.cardzforkidz.org, like us on Facebook page, follow us on Twitter , visit our Google+ page, or visit our LinkedIn page! Also, check out some of our videos on YouTube!