A Sunday morning, an early morning- where some of us would have still been in bed sleeping through the morning, or been at church worshipping;
Nonetheless, the group of us had managed to make it- in time- to the concourse of Methodist Girls’ School, bringing with us a whole jingbang of load. From large bags containing boxes of baked goods- namely, brownies and cereal-raisin cookies- to trays, and bulky plastic bags of self-designed T-shirts of all sizes, with even their hangers being brought along. Obviously, every single detail, down to the last miniscule specific on the presentation of the shirts, was already well thought out and pre-planned by Ethan, our ringleader.
As we approached the final leg of our fundraising efforts, today was our last baking sale session- our last opportunity to raise as much funds as we possibly could for our trip to Cambodia. Not, of course, to fund our trip, but to fund the Purpose of our trip.
After having been through one previous bake sale, experienced, we were once again prepared to go all out at full force today and attack as many potential customers as we could. All in the name of Charity.
Our ‘customers’ today was the congregation of the Wesley Methodist Church. Talking to a few people around, we found out that there too, was a group from the Church going down to Cambodia on a mission trip. Perhaps it was this fateful coincidence that the people of the church warmed up to us quickly and our baked goods and T-shirts were very well-received by the crowd there.
At the ring of a school bell, the congregation began streaming out of the chapel, indicating to us the start of our sales. In the spirit of fun, and also to rev up sales, we came up with a competition to see who could finish selling all the stuff on their trays in the shortest possible time. From our last baking sale, the two top ‘salesman’ identified in our group was Douglas and Ben, and both competed in good spirit, assisted by one other helper. Initially, with only a handful of people in the concourse, keeping track of the progress was easy. However, as more and more churchgoers emerged from the chapel after service, the concourse was soon thick with the crowd. Too caught up in the flurry of activities- scurrying to and fro to re-stock on brownies and cookies that were selling like hot cakes, and to get the change for our customers, each side lost track of the numerous boxes of cookies and brownies sold.
Only when the crowd started to subside, and when we were sure we had approached about every single father, mother, man and women in the concourse, did we take a breather. As the buzz around us ebbed, looking at the deflated bags around us, once filled-up to the brim with boxes of cookies, we knew that our scurrying about had been well worth its result. There were only a few straggling boxes of cookies left to finish off.
To sum up our morning’s efforts, the HL Math people among us: Cheryl, Ben and Alan- those who calculated at a light-year’s pace too fast for the normal SL Math beings- set out to calculate our profits through a series of far-too-complex mental sums that only astounded the rest by its final figure. Altogether, we had achieved a profit of over $1000 from today’s bake sale session-
A Sunday afternoon: where it would be about time for some of us to finally pull ourselves out of bed, or for some of us to be in the midst of lunching with friends or family after church,
We, the same group of us, walked out of the school gates, $1000 and more closer to our goal of raising $10,000 for the children and villagers living in the village of Taom, Cambodia.
