Dale Rankine

My wife and I (along with many others) have been supporting a children’s refuge in Tapachula, Mexico for a couple of years now, helping them to build a new house. Mission Mexico has around 50 orphaned, abused, abandoned and poverty-stricken children, from 16 month old babies through to teenagers. The wonderful people who run this refuge, Pam and Alan Skuse, are from my home state of Queensland, and have basically given up retirement to care for these children full-time.

Right now the house they are in is great apart from one major flaw – the roof. Tapachula, like most of southern Mexico, is very wet, and hot. It averages around 3000mm of rain each year, and 32 degC every day of the year. The roof on the refuge is not watertight and is not insulated, meaning these 50 kids plus adults are regularly flooded inside the house and go through extreme heat conditions.

My wife and some friends here in Australia are helping to raise the money needed to fix this roof – $25,000 AUD (around $20k US) by the end of August. There’s a number of initiatives we’re working on, but one that I have started for those particularly in business is www.letsfixtheroof.com. It’s just a simple one-page site that outlines the need, and gives you the details for making online donations (through an aid organisation called Global Development Group, also here in Australia). Moket has kicked in some money to start the ball rolling, and we’ve had some more support recently added, so we’re well on the way! Donating through this small campaign will get your logo on the donations section of the site – big or small, local or multi-national, $1 or $1000, as a way of saying thank you for your generosity.

If you, or someone that you have access to within your company (who writes the cheques!), is able to make a donation towards this cause, we would be most appreciative – and more importantly, the children at Mission Mexico will appreciate it as well. I know these are difficult times financially for many, but I believe for those of us living in relative abundance to some parts of the world, it’s a constant duty of ours to care for those less fortunate.

Please consider.