The kind human folk over at GOAT Basketball Korea host a semi-annual 3v3 tourney to benefit various causes and have chosen GCE as their next beneficiary, for which we are both grateful and excited: Grateful for the financial assistance, and excited to see our Director get dunked on left and right. While he may be the fastest slow guy on the court, he's also like 5'2" and cursed by all the Based God's leftover spell books. Stick him on the sickly Poindexter with baby giraffe reflexes and suddenly that dude's hitting 30 foot hook shots right in our guy's face, because black magic. 

Tournament goes down this upcoming Sunday, January 15. Most of you aren't in Seoul and will be unable to come through, but be sure to check back for photos and video of the event. In the meantime, here's one of GOAT's promotional posters for y'all to fawn over:

Here is the posterity we call the raffle drawing for our annual Facebook spamathon. Before conducting said drawing, we'd like to thank everyone who bought a ticket. You make the world go round one tiny village in Namibia.

Now, to the drawing. We were supposed to hold a live drawing at our annual Yo' Mama Haiku Battle, but turns out a Christmas Eve staycation in Seoul is a tough sell to all the haiku talent that traveled to SE Asia instead. So we have postponed the battle until the spring, which means it didn't go off last night, which means we didn't have an opportunity to do a live drawing, which means we went with the next best option: throwing makeshift raffle tickets in a pancake mixing bowl and activating the laptop cam. Sorry about this guy's face, but good luck to you if you bought any tickets.

For real this time, the drawing. If you don't feel like watching then the results are below.

- Watch from La Mer Collections: Christine Gallagher

- Thai sarong and scarves set (A): Julia Duch

- Thai sarong and scarves set (B): Veny Choi

- Thai sarong and scarves set (C): Christine Gallagher

- Vietnamese tote + propaganda art set: Kyle Warren

- Vietnamese tote + laptop bag: Michael Corbat

- Himba bracelet (2): Kyle Warren

- Himba bracelet: Philip Maher

- Himba bracelet: Veny Choi

- Himba bracelet: Natalie Pool

Sorry to everyone who didn't win. We were trying to rig it for you but no dice. Next year for sure.

It’s that time of year again for us to “borrow” a bell and bucket from the Salvation Army, put our Santa hat on, apply eyeliner around our big doe eyes, and stand outside in the frigid cold Internet hoping you’ll leave your spare change in our PayPal collection box when exiting Amazon.com, AKA we’re holding our annual holiday raffle for the good of GCE mankind. This year we’re teaming up with The Humble Telescopes, a brand new organization that empowers homeless and at-risk Atlanta youth by connecting them with artists via skills-building workshops, apprenticeships, and mentoring relationships. So not only will buying raffle tickets support our own wonderful scholars, it’ll also help THT give their charges the artistic and goal-oriented skills to help them carve out fulfilling lives for themselves. Plus, big things on both our plates this year: GCE has plans to start a tutoring center in the village square, while THT is trying to turn these workshops they've been funding on a string up to turbo boost. Let's help them get that running start they deserve.

The raffle will be drawn at our annual holiday party, affectionately called the Yo’ Mama Haiku Battle. This year’s rendition is subtitled Constructive Criticism for Your Momz and will be hosted December 24 in Seoul, Korea at the Southside Parlor. Please join, though since you live in not-Korea and most likely can’t then please join the video of the raffle drawing we will post afterward on this here blog.

Tickets for the raffle are $10 each or 4 for $20 and can be purchased through our PayPal button:

If you live in Koko then everything's the same, except 10,000 and 20,000. You can either wire your wons to KEB account #620-189798-483 or, better yet, come to the aforementioned fundraising par-tay and buy your raffle tickets there. Do it before 11:00 pm (9:00 am EST) since that's when we will have the drawing.

As far as prizes, well here is what we have:

Goods from our friends at La Mer Collections, the best watch company in the multiverse.

Scarf and sarong sets from Thailand for when you’re cold and then later when you’re hot.

Vietnamese rice bags...repurposed as totes!

Namibian Himba bracelets, handmade from recycled PVC piping. Recycled is probably just code for "the neighbors were gone so we dug up their pipes," but still, all your friends will give you compliments so who cares?

And some Vietnamese propaganda art you can put on your walls or hide in the basement depending on your political sensibilities. (Ignore the "Dogma" watermark. We got the picture from the Dogma Collection website, where you're welcome to purchase this piece if you don't win it.)

Legalese: Proceeds from the raffle will be split evenly between Gosen Community Effort and The Humble Telescopes. Raffle prizes are restricted to people who buy tickets. Limit one prize per person assuming that person only bought one ticket. If they bought two then they are theoretically allowed to win two prizes. If they buy ten tickets, well then, we hope you win them all! Please remember that in the 501(c)3 world the purchase of raffle tickets is not tax deductable, so if you'd like to make a dedicated contribution then please include a note with your donation and we will issue you a receipt instead.

Happy (late) Thanksgiving. We hope you and yours had a wonderful day filled with family and your Instagram feed. We here at GCE have some news:

​GCE will be adding a new board member next month to our already formidable team. Her name is Kaitlyn Shepard, and were she bereft of the necessary skills and experience to help us pursue our mission we still would have unanimously voted aye on the basis of her wedding get down alone:

Kaitlyn's actual superpowers draw from her time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Onankali Village, where she worked on small business development and other community projects, some of which where done in conjunction with our friends at Gosen Combined School. She was also very helpful as a liaison whenever GCE needed some rando errands run that side and were unable to just pop on over to Namibia to get them done.

Kaitlyn will be a great addition to our Board, and we are very excited about incorporating her understanding of the Gosen community into our plans moving forward. Those plans, for the record, are to do nawa by the children. Fo'shoshili.

Our Director recently visited Gosen Combined School to size up future scholars. They're all looking good!

Le Director also dropped in on current scholars, who are dispersed among five area senior secondary schools. The first stop was Ekulo SSS to see Matheus Gabriel, Sheepo Sakeus, and Sakarias David.

A few moments were devoted to encouraging these gentlemen along in their studies but most of our time together was spent exhorting them to tie their shoes lest they trip and hurt themselves.

The next stop on our tour of area senior secondary schools was Uukule SSS, where roughly half our scholars historically attend. Currently enrolled from left to right are Uuta Frans, Immanuel Ester, Shilunga Beata, Petrus Johannes (directly behind Beata), Hamalwa Fillemon, Uugwanga Martha, and Kangumu Rhys. 

Since time was tight the plan was to meet with school admin to pay their fees then see the students long enough to say hello and not much more, but they insisted on a tour of their classrooms as a collective group. It put us way behind schedule, but that's just the way things go in Namibia. All good since a few laughs are far more memorable than whether or not you were able to keep to an arbitrary schedule, or at least that's what we say on this here blog to justify the lack of media from those class visits. The problem when your Director and Media Relations Coordinator are the same person is that the Director is a bit chatty, and when he gets going the Media Relations Coordinator sometimes forgets to stop and turn the camera on.

After visiting Uukule we dropped in on Nghiryemata Sonia at Nehale SSS. Since she was our only scholar there the Director took a photo with her so she wouldn't look so lonely in our blog recap.

Unfortunately, this is where our time with the students ended. While the purpose of our visits was twofold - to visit scholars and pay their school fees - one ultimately has priority over the other, which is why we couldn't visit our scholars at Juuso and Onguti secondary schools. In the case of Juuso SSS, fees must be paid in the regional capital at the Ministry of Education, so after visiting Nehale we only had enough time to either visit the scholars there or hightail it to Ondangwa to make sure their finances were in order. Since going to school is more important than being seen at school, we opted to visit beautifulish Ondangwa and wade through the bureaucratic joke show associated with anything remotely non-beureacratic, which is a story we will save for a post on Craigslist's rants and raves rather than here. In the case of our single scholar at Onguti SSS, we actually dropped by but were unable to see him due to an administration error that led us to believe he wasn't even enrolled there. He was, and his dues have since been accounted for.

Once again, thank you to everyone who's supported our efforts to see these wonderful students through high school. And in case you're curious about our travels through Namibia: all costs are borne as a personal expenses. Money raised by GCE is spent on GCE scholars solamente minus a few expenses associated with bank transfers and regulatory filings. Your dollars stretch far with us.

We usually disburse funds by wiring a lump sum to our man on the ground, who then visits each of our scholars' high schools in person to make payments on their behalf. This year, however, our Director was in Namibia and did the dropping in himself. Here is what an hour and a half of his life looked like at Uukule Senior Secondary since receipts are written out by hand x 7 students x 3 separate hostel funds = should have budgeted more than a day to visit all 5 schools our scholars are attending.

A more comprehensive summary of our Director's visit will be published shortly. By comprehensive we mean a bunch of photos and not much else.

Since GCE emerged from the primordial soup to hand out high school scholarships to the brighter and brightest, our funding formula has been pretty straightforward: school, hostel, and grade 12 exit exam fees. Over our first five years, those costs have averaged about $230 per student for both years of their senior secondary schooling, though averages from individual years have differed based on the exchange rate. (1 USD was 6.9 NAD when we first started, 11.5 last year, and is about 16 this year; our expenses have dropped even though our obligations have grown.)

Two years ago, the Namibian Government instituted free universal primary education, and this year they have extended their support to secondary schooling as well. That means students are no longer required to pay school or testing fees, which for us means an existential crisis of sorts. Whereas before we could say we paid for school and hostel fees and everyone just understood, now we have to go through the pains of explaining the ancillary costs associated with education and how those burdens are just as heavy for our scholars' families. Basically, our support has shifted from the previous funding formula to a new one that covers hostel, uniform, and transport costs. 

We are not exactly sure how this will affect our costs but we do expect them to go up a bit. School fees were generally between N$400 and N$500 a year, and testing fees were expected to be about N$700 this year, so between N$1500 and N$1700 per student, plus hostel fees. As far as uniform and transport costs, we just don't know yet but are anticipating uniforms to cost between N$550 and N$1200 each year (depending if their school requires a blazer or not) while transport will be contingent upon how far they are from their respective schools and how many round trip journeys we choose to approve. Round trip taxi fare ranges from N$40 to N$90 and there are three semesters to account for as well as students traveling back and forth on weekends to help out with the realities of sustenance farming. Let's just say three trips a semester and call it a board meeting that you were invited to, shall we?

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Decoder ring: N$ indicates Namibian dollars (NAD). The Namibian dollar is pegged to the South African rand (ZAR).

GCE is proud to announce we will be supporting 7 new scholars in 2016. Add that to the 11 from last year and we will be making the reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic rain on 18 scholars total.

2016 Scholars

Hamalwa Phillemon
Kangumu Rhys
Nghiryemata Sonia
Petrus Johannes
Phillipus Samia
Shifeta Kristof
Uuta Frans

Pictured from left to right are Phillemon, Kristof, Johannes, Saima, and Sonia. We would like to thank them for taking time out from the studio to pose for this picture. Use coupon code "Gosen" when checking out of iTunes to get 20% off whatever album they were working on.

If you recall, our Director promised to get a mullet if we raised at least $1000 during our online holiday panhandling. We in fact raised nearly $2000, so this is what he now looks like Fridays at 4:58 pm:

And what he looks like at 5:01:

If GCE had company cars they would all be '85 IROC-Z's.

The winner of our recent 50/50 Raffle for the Good of Two Mankinds, a gentleman named Mat Dolata, initially asked that the money go toward a toy drive his workplace sponsors for low-income youth in the Portland, Oregon area. Unfortunately, our drawing was held well after the toys had been bought and wrapped, so he opted that the donation be given to OHSU's Child Development and Rehabilitation Center instead, as wonderful an organization to support as there ever was. Please check them out.

Thanks again to Mr. Dolata for his participation in our raffle and to you as well for yours.