2010 Whats in store for this year

Hello all,

I would like to wish you all a happy new year and hope you are all rejuvenated for the year 2010. I would like to apologise for the limited activity on our blog in recent months, with our journey being caught midway through, but I promise to endeavour to finish the recollection of how the ride unfolded soon.

We now have an official 'rough cut' version of our documentary produced and filmed by our incredible Ling Ang from which we will be viewing within the next few days. This will give a little insight to our own journey in conducting the ride, but more importantly we will then add a little bit of a professionals footage of the East Timor story that will hopefully create real awareness of our closest neighbour and also raise funds. We are looking to hold screenings at a later date to be announced so fingers crossed.

Furthermore, I aim to take our bikeride further and approach the Wangaratta Council to adopt it as they have a different project, where schoolies elect to travel to a Timorese community and volunteer their efforts. I hope it could be used as a team building event as it certainly impacted upon ours, also a fundraising effort whether it go directly to the community or the school leavers to assist their program. In addition I just hope that it can get some major backing and therefore make a bigger impact in informing and bringing the situation to us Australians as we had trouble being a very small fish.

In other news I would like to bring to attention the efforts of the Oaktree Foundation in particpating in such events as Stand Up for Change in contacting Parlimentarians, the creation of a national tour from the South African Zulu Choir, the staging of a trivia night in Melbourne Town hall and currently about to embark on a Road Trip in the fight to erradicate Extreme Poverty. I encourage you all to look into the Oaktree Foundation to get involved or just general awareness of current challenges we as the world community face.

So thankyou for reading our blog whether it be once or frequently and I hope this can be effectively used as a tool of communication of what just a few people of vast amounts are doing to try and make that smallest of difference in the world.

Cheers Nick Porter