School Supply Donations- WishList Wednesday- Pencil Sharpeners

Welcome back to our WishList Wednesday post! We hope you had an amazing week. So let’s get right into it. Last week we talked about pencils! Plain old, run of the mill, yellow, wooden #2 pencils. And how this is such a needed school supply. It is so simple and basic but without one, achieving any kind of education becomes monumentally harder. 

So this week , we will highlight the pencil’s bestest friend.. A Pencil Sharpener!

Now, I may be dating myself a bit here but let's go anyway!

OK, who remembers these little devils? They came in sooooo many colors, some with the cute little shaving catchers, others without. But the one thing they all had in common… they DIDN’T work!!! If you were so lucky to have one with its own self-contained shaving catcher, you could spend the day blissfully spinning your pencil around and around and around while sitting at your desk, trying helplessly to get some small semblance of a point. Until you managed to chew that poor piece of wood and graphite down to a tiny nub. So you gave up, walked over to the trash can, held this pencil torture device over the wastepaper can and dumped all the cute curly bits all over the floor… because no matter how hard you tried, they never, ever went into the can. 

Now if you were not the lucky one to have the “ fancy” sharpener, you had to trudge over to the can, pencil and illegitimate carving tool in hand and try to get a hint of a tip on your pencil, Showering the area with your debris as you went. I'm sure there are still custodians with PTSD from sweeping up a small forest worth of curly-ques.  So downtrodden and defeated you schlup back to your desk and try your best to scratch out something semi-legible with your half-pointed stick. 

 So why this trip down memory lane? Because it's 2024 and we can do better! We have the technology, we can rebuild it!  I can't recall a classroom that did not have a hand-cranked pencil sharpener bolted to a wall or the corner of a teacher's desk. We all would find a reason to wander over, either to kill time or stroll past our friends. The satisfying feeling of inserting your pencil, spinning the handle around fast for a revolution and pulling out a pristinely sharpened pencil that could spear a small animal if need-be. Then what did we all do? We taped the point with our finger to make sure it was sharp. Triumphant you strolled back to your seat, ready to take on the next exercise. 

The students in the rural areas of Kenya, like these kids in Mbita, only have access to the former. Little, tiny handheld twisty sharpeners, that do little more than chew up the precious commodity of pencils. 

So this week's school supply to donate focus goes hand in hand with last week’s Pencils. A Pencil Sharpener. We have added enough for each classroom to have one AND a backup blade to keep those newly donated pencils in tip-top writing condition, without wasting their precious wood by sacrificing it to the trash can monster. These are sustainable and reusable.. And most importantly.. FUNCTIONAL!

So if the memory of those mini sharpeners has triggered  trauma in your  soul and you want to save anymore young kids from going through what we suffered through, check out our donations page and place an order for a set. Save their sanity before it's too late! 

Amondisavengers.com/wishlists