Ryan's Dinner Speech for his Eagle Scout Project

I would like to thank you all for being here tonight and for your generous donations. When I first thought of doing this project, I did not think there would be such a LARGE response.

I searched the internet for a Hungarian orphanage I could help and found a great organization that helps a lot of orphanages and group homes in Hungary. The organization is called the Harvest Generation Foundation. It was founded in 2001 by Mr. and Mrs. Sandor and Patricia Varga. Patricia has been my main contact in Hungary throughout this project. She is a Christian missionary who moved to Hungary from California in 1992. She has been a great source of information and help.

Hungary is an Eastern European country in between Austria and Romania, Slovakia and Croatia. There are at least 22,000 children and young people in state care. There has been a 15% decrease in government funding since 2008 so they need a lot of help.

With Patricia’s help, I created a detailed Eagle Scout Project Proposal, which had to be approved by Br. Mouritsen, Br. Peterson, and Mr. Stone who is the council representative. I appreciate their help with this process. I was kind of anxious to get started, so the day after I got mu final approval, I had some friends over and we made 13 posters to advertise my project. I put those posters out with boxes at the Heidelberg church, Wiesbaden church, and Stake center; the PX, the shoppette, the post office, the high school, the elementary school, the bowling alley, and the commissary. The response has been amazing. We visited each of these sites once or twice a week to collect items and each time the boxes were overflowing. We took down those boxes and signs in the last week, but yesterday at the commissary we found that even though the box was gone, there was a giant shopping cart full of toys and 2 big bags of clothing.

Another way I have received stuff is though pickups. People have contacted me and asked for me to come pick up items from their house. So far I have done 11 home pickups.

As you can imagine, our challenge now is figuring out how to get all the donated items to Budapest. We have been considering many options.

Thank you all for the donations you have brought to his donation event. If you have not already done so, I would ask if you could sort your donations according to the categories of clothing and toys that we have in the back. And if you would like, it would be a great help if you could take another bag or two from under the table and sort those as well.

Emily, Katie, my parents and I will be driving to Budapest Hungary on March on March 21st to personally deliver the donated items. I imagine I will learn a lot about how petty my own troubles are compared to these kids we are serving. We will be doing craft day with the kids, which should be a fun experience for me and my family. We are depending on your monetary donations to buy the craft supplies.

We are also depending on your monetary donations to provide the children with Easter Candy. We have a station set up in the back so you can put together Ziploc bags of candy which will be given to each individual child. We will also be bringing unsorted candy to Patricia for Easter baskets for many orphanages depending on how much we are able to collect or purchase.

If you would like to donate additional money, please see me or my Dad. Thank you again for being here tonight and for supporting my Eagle Scout project. I hope you all have a great rest of your night.