Thanks to last year's Venice Ball attendees, we raised $4,000 that was donated to help build a school in Chinchero, Peru.

La Casa de los Ninos (The Children's House), will finish construction in March 2009. Twelve girls (ages 10 to 14) have been selected from the nearby village of Usabamba to live and study at the school. If La Casa de los Ninos did not exist these girls would never have had an opportunity to continue their education.

It cost $30,000 to build the school which will include a library and technology center. Along with a $25,000 anonymous donation, the money raised from last year's Venice Ball made the dream of building La Casa de los Ninos a reality.

Seattle non-profit, Crooked Trails (www.crookedtrails.com) was founded in 1998 to create more environmentally and culturally sensitive travel in areas where the negative impacts of tourism were threatening the cultures and environments of popular tourist destinations or fragile regions. For the past several years, Crooked Trails, in cooperation with other NGOs, has conducted a series of travel programs in support of the indigenous peoples of Thailand, Nepal, Vietnam, Peru, India and Kenya. Our programs allow local communities the opportunity to develop and administrate cultural exchange programs that help support their efforts to preserve and protect their environments and to confront the challenges of their rapidly changing surroundings. Over the past decade Crooked Trails has helped build schools, sanitation projects and community development projects with the help of travelers, donors and the communities we work with.

The Namaste Children’s Fund:(www.namastechildrensfund.org)In 2000, Seattle photographer Cora Edmonds photographed a young child while traveling in the remote Humla region of western Nepal. The photo showed the boy with his palms together in the traditional Namaste gesture of greeting and respect, and the image had a dramatic impact on her life. Spurred on by their strong intuitive connection with the boy in the photograph, Cora Edmonds and Phil Crean returned to Nepal in 2007 to search for the child. Their quest was successful and they found the boy, Gyeni Bohara, living in an impoverished village called Thehe. When asked what they could offer him, the young boy asked for assistance with his education, which they granted. Touched by the wisdom of the culture yet unable to forget the hardship and poverty they witnessed in Thehe, Cora and Phil established the Namaste Children's Fund in 2008, a non-profit organization to help rural children and their communities in Nepal. Namaste Children's Fund is currently supporting the local school in Thehe village, implementing health projects in the village, and running a boarding home for Thehe children to attend a larger school in nearby Simikot, the capitol city of the Humla region.

A sponsorship program has been set up to allow people to donate to cover for living and school expenses for the girls attending La Casa de los Ninos($50/month per girl).

100% of the proceeds from the 2010 Venetian Masked Carnival Ball will benefit two local charities:
Crooked Trails and The Namaste Children’s Fund.
Venice Ball will be donated to the La Casa de los Ninos
sponsorship program.