Dear Friends,
We've been quite overwhelmed by your messages of support and donations. We put months of work into our YouTube channel because we wanted it to be a quality production (well as quality as it can be by total amateurs). While we love doing it, it obviously needs to bring some benefit to our project financially, especially at a time when our new business is a bit on the ropes because of the international crisis whose name we dare not speak...
Thanks to you we hit our goal of 250 euros, and went beyond it. This was the point at which we said to ourselves we would know that it was worthwhile to continue, and so sure enough, we'll be ploughing more time and resources into it now.
You have all contributed enough, and this isn't a request for more donations, but just to let you know our next, exciting project. Last September a young, Lithuanian man called Ignat asked to come and volunteer for us. We were about to do our first big open day, so we thought that it would be really useful to have some extra help for it, and so we accepted him. He was biding his time before starting a language course at a French university which would then allow him to apply for his dream course in Film-making in Paris. A month became two months, and suddenly it was Christmas and he was still living with us. We dropped him off in Grenoble for his French course in January with heavy hearts, a bag of instant food, and a lot of worry about what life was going to be like for him. His language course was taken online just days before he arrived, and his accomodation was a rather cell-like room in a tower block in an industrial estate. No shops were open, nobody was socialising in the accomodation, there was a curfew, and there was no prospect of him getting a part time job to sustain himself.
Twelve days later he came 'home' to us for a break, and we all realised that he should just come back to live. He's gone to collect his things and we hope that he will now stay with us for the foreseeable future and do his course online from here. One thing we would like to support him in is a fantastic project that he started, to create 3D tours of Rosieres. He's trialled it on two towers so far and it's really impressive. We want to be able to pay him to do this, as he really needs the money, and this is technical work that deserves to be paid for. But we don't have a budget for this at the moment. So our donations on this site, up to the next 250 euros, will be to support the 3D project. We hope that he gets enough confidence at the end of it to set up his own business, and we look forward, very excitedly, to sharing it with you all!