Summer's over and time to get back to Serving!

Hope you all had a great Summer!
Our next project is coming up and we hope you're all excited to get back to serving with us! In the meantime, take advantage of all those back to school supply deals out there to bring to donate at our next project. We'll use those for school kits later for kids that need our help.

See you September 17th!

March Project

We did so well this week! Congrats to everyone! We have a new project director. We would love to thank her! The new bead frogs are a hit but are a little complicated! Last time I think we had some new visitors! We learned more about the places our stuff goes. It was so touching to see people we had made happy. Retiring elders, homeless families, Ethiopian orphans, and so many more. We made so much for them this week! I'm so happy for all the people we get to help. We made 3 fuzzy warm fleece blankets, 3 cute bead frogs, 2 fierce bead geckos, 19 colorful pictures, 16 fuzzy scarves, 31 adorable bracelets, and 60 baby kits. The baby kits were our special projects. We made them for babies who are born needing supplies to be taken care of with. We put in lots of stuff like baby powder, 2 fuzzy towels, soap, etc. (for each bag). It was happy to think of all the babies that would get help! I hope everyone can come next time (the sidebar has our next date). Please come and help your fellow friends with a wondrous work to save the world, a couple people at a time!

Serving With Smiles goes to Ethiopia!

Hello! My name is Amanda, and I am a guest blogger today on the SWS Blog. We had another great Serving With Smiles project this last Saturday. Lots of great kids showed up and lots of great things were accomplished. Thanks everyone! Hope to see you next time around!
I wanted to come on here and tell you a little bit about my experience taking the Serving With Smiles bracelets and Geckos to Ethiopia just a few weeks ago. My husband I traveled to Addis Ababa (that's the capital city of Ethiopia,) to appear in court for the finalization of our adoption of two beautiful children there.
We took with us on our trip lots of bracelets and geckos that our sweet Serving with Smiles children made here in Saratoga Springs Utah. We were able to deliver them to 3 different orphanages where the children absolutely loved them! They were thrilled!
I can't post pictures of the full faces of orphans that are not my own children here, so I've only included these two photos so you can get a little bit of an idea.
That's our son in this photo below! See how happy this gecko made him?! He's a serious boy, so it was so nice to see this nice big smile out of him! :)
We thought the children there would like these bracelets and geckos, but we didn't know that they were gonna go nuts over them! It made them so happy!!! What surprised us even more, is that the boys liked the bracelets too. The girls liked the geckos too. The adults all wanted bracelets! They wanted all the babies to have bracelets. These were a hit!

I will tell you a little story I like to call
"The miracle of the Serving With Smiles Bracelets."
Here's how it goes in a nutshell...
We take over two large ziplock bags with SWS bracelets and geckos in them. We think we need to be careful and ration these out carefully there in Ethiopia. We visit 3 orphanages and find that everyone, and we mean everyone in those orphanages want a bracelet! We don't have the heart to turn anyone down at all. So we give them all out. Guess what? Still there are bracelets left!
We decide we have enough left over to give some out to children on the streets. We do that for a few days. Guess what? STILL bracelets left over!
Finally, the last day we are left with a bag that is still about half way full of bracelets! How did this happen?!
We are getting ready to head to the airport. We give out bracelets to all the children we see around us on the street. No kids left. Still about 12 bracelets!
Suddenly a man honks his horn to get our attention. He hops out of his truck. He had watched us giving these out and was hoping he could get one too. We give him the rest of the bag and encounter no more children. We like to imagine him taking those home to his family who probably loved them. What a funny story hu?

Thanks for all your work you little humanitarians! You made lots and lots and lots of Ethiopians happy!

When we go back to Ethiopia in about a month, we'll be bringing your hygeine kits you made. Thanks so much! You're gonna make a lot more smiles with all that serving you have done. We really appreciate you!

January 2011 Project

Some of our projects!

The quilt almost completed! (and now it is!)

Making geckos!

Hard at work!

As you can tell from the pictures above, everything is going wonderfully but don't get the idea we couldn't use your help! We successfully made 5 Winter hats (which are so cute and will be put to good use!), 1 quilt (what an accomplishment!), 2 fleece blankets (warm!), 6 bead geckos (so cool!), 39 bracelets (wow!), 23 scarves (amazing!), and finally, 39 happy pictures (perfectly colored).We also made hygiene kits. I am proud to congratulate the many people that showed up and helped. As for where the things are going: The geckos and bracelets are for several orphanages in Ethiopia. They will be brought there by my mom (no, I'm not going!). The pictures are going to a retirement center for the elderly. It was a great week and remember to come next time!

Serving With Smiles Visits the Maliheh Clinic

We donated winter hats, gloves, bracelets & geckos and some toys we’ve collected.

People go to this clinic when they can’t afford to go to a regular clinic.

The doctors and nurses give our donations to the kids that come in to help them not be scared, and to keep them warm when they leave. 100’s of doctors, nurses, dentists and other people come work there for free in their spare time.