The journey of a quilt

A colleague (director of a library in a southwest suburb and a fellow Rotarian) wrote me yesterday: "Were your ears burning this morning? A picture of one of your quilts for Alliance for Smiles was shown during a presentation at today’s Rotary meeting. The presenter read the label off the screen, and it was yours! I told the group that I knew you, and impressed the heck out of ‘em! Guess you’re world-famous now!"

The funny thing is that I did not give the quilt to this project! I e-mailed the presenter, a Rotarian from Oswego, IL, and he sent me the photo that my friend commented on. Obviously it is a quilt that I made. I donated it to the Rotary Club of Boothbay Harbor, ME, which was collecting quilts for Safe Passage (http://www.safepassage.org/) a couple of years ago. The Boothbay club coordinator told me that my quilt was not going directly to Guatemala but would be sold (or raffled) stateside as part of a fundraiser. Evidently it ended up with Alliance for Smiles -- keeping it in the Rotary family.

BTW, the project is: http://www.allianceforsmiles.org/ "Alliance for Smiles (AfS) was founded in October of 2004 by five members of the Rotary Club of San Francisco who had been involved for ten years previously with cleft lip and palate reconstructive surgery. The desire on the part of the Founders was to create a two tiered program that not only send medical teams to sites to perform free reconstructive surgery but to also create Treatment Centers where the protocol of cleft treatment found in Center in the United States could be replicated. "

(P.S. My personal random access memory recalled that Cleft Palate Research was one of Alpha Gamma Delta's mid-20th century philanthropies (then called 'altruistic projects'), so there's another connection, albeit peripheral.)