2104 In Review

Well... we survived. Barely. With less than 2k in the bank we managed to fund 156 loans, pay for all of their booth fees for 3 months, pay our employees through March and pay off our credit card. Good news is our friendship is still in tact. Ha!

A success and yet a failure all at once. I wont rehash that - you'll have to read the previous entries. We havent started attempting to collect on the loans we gave out. Going to start doing that in February since that is when the other loan recipients were told they had to start paying back. Emphasis on HAD b.c Open Hand requires a pay back simply enough for the fact that we cant continue our organization without it.

In thinking back over this year I think my emotions wouldn't have been so off the charts if money wasnt an issue. If I could get people to give to what we are trying to do then it wouldnt be so stressful. Man I wish I was a celebrity with a charity. Piece of cake. Two stay at home moms on the other hand... not so easy. Who am I kidding, it was pure hell. And now the question comes to what does the future hold for Open Hand? Is there a future? If so, what is our next project and where the hell do we think we are going to get money for it? I hope against hope that we are wrong and that the Haitian people will repay their loans. If they do, we can duplicate somewhere else in the country of Haiti. If they dont... then lights out for Open Hand. Haiti is an easy flight and same time zone but not where we ultimately want to be. We want to be back in Africa. But truth be told - that type of a time commitment, flights etc... just isnt feasible for me with a 5 year old. And now that Alisha lives in Brazil, not exactly easy for her either. Do we step back and lick our wounds and try to come out fighting sometime in the future? Do we simply let the curtains of Open Hand close? Certainly wasnt the global impact we had dreamed of when we started this thing. Then again, we are in our first year. On the flip side is that if our first project doesn't have a good return on the money, or any return on the money than our entire model is off and we can't talk about how the donations are cyclical. That was a huge plus in what we are attempting to do.

So I dont know what 2015 hold for Open Hand. I dont want to be a quitter but the fact is the money isnt there for anything else. We exhausted our resources and then some. Wouldnt it be great if the Haitian people were so grateful they paid back their loans? Wouldn't it be great if we could be proud of ourselves and what we have done instead of ashamed we didnt hit the goals we had so desperately hoped for? It would be nice to not go down for the count over just one project in our first year. It would be nice to not have this be our only year, but I don't have the answer.