My name is Peter Balasky and I am the founder of Friends of Madagascar, a not-for profit corporation. The Friends of Madagascar was organized with the objectives of providing educational and health supplies to students in Madagascar and fostering intercultural awareness and communication between students in the USA and Madagascar. We are focusing on providing basic educational items, ranging from pencils, pens, markers, learning aids, building classrooms, and employing teachers. We also provide toothbrushes, soap, and clean water containers. All of these items are donated by the students, schools and generous individuals. To maximize the personal involvement of the USA students, we ask them to compose a letter containing information they would like to pass onto a students in a different culture. These letters are included with the donations to the Malagasy schools and students. The thought and effort in producing these letters hopefully requires a self-analysis of our values, possessions and culture.
		Preceding this letter writing, we, or the teachers, present an overview of the needs that exist and how our help is important. This concept becomes more real when we bring back letters from the Malagasy students and photos of them receiving the donations. Our hope is that this brief exposure to the conditions which occur in Madagascar, and in most of the world, will encourage them to be less egocentric, more sensitive to the needs of the world and more appreciative of their good fortune of living in America.
	Why Madagascar? Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, but it is fortunate to have a stable, democratic government and the frame-work of social institutions left over from a long period of French colonization. The people are peaceful and industrious. The economy is based on subsistence agriculture and is very limited by lack of marketable resources or outside capital. So the infrastructure of the country has been slowly eroding since the French left. Madagascar is blessed with being one of the most biodiverse areas in the world. The biodiversity has been recognized by many governments and organizations who are trying to preserve as much as possible, but population pressures, lack of funding and an uneducated population makes progress rather tedious. How can an illiterate, struggling population be expected to appreciate conserving their bio-diversity?
	Madagascar has many needs but is in a situation where a little help will make a big difference. They do not have wide scale hunger or disease problems. They just don't have enough resources to make good gains against the problems. I believe that education is the key to progress and every little bit helps. Friends of Madagascar has provided school supplies and toothbrushes to approximately 2,000 students and distributed approximately $50,000 for schools and teachers. There are no administrative costs - everything that is donated goes directly to the people.