100 ABSTRACTS - NUMBER 84 & MONO MONDAY

It’s a wet and miserable morning, so I won’t be going out, as Mr. HCB has gone off in the car to cricket at Cheltenham - rather him than me but he has taken plenty of warm, wet weather gear, and perhaps it won’t be raining there!

I had something in my mind for the Mono Monday theme - bearing in mind that mono doesn’t necessarily mean black and white.  I saw that the theme for today was “Far Out!” with an exclamation mark, and I do love them, so I looked up some synonyms and found these:

“Bizarre, cranky, crazy, curious, eccentric, funky, funny, kinky, outlandish, peculiar, quaint, quirky, strange, whacky, way-out, weird, wild.”

I thought these were enough to be going on with, and many of you who know me, will understand that most of these appealled to me and my quirky sense of humour.  Not being able to go out, I then had to think of something that I could shoot either in the house, or from the house and an idea formed in my mind.

I took the tree from the open door of our conservatory and then fartnarkled it a bit with the iColorama app, made it rather triangular and abstract and then processed it a bit more on my computer with the shape you now see.  I also wanted to give this a name - well why not be a little more quirky than usual?  So, who can guess the name of this young lady?  

The tree is green, of course, as they are at this time of year, and therefore, the background had to be green too, as it was going to be a Mono Monday entry.  Of course, it also had to fit in with my 100 Abstract Challenge, which I am doing to raise awareness of the Mamie Martin Fund, which helps impoverished girls in North Malawi to obtain a good secondary education.  Finding out the following makes me want to help these girls even more:

“Only 35% of children in Malawi complete primary school and in first grade, the teacher to student ratio is 1:130. While this ratio decreases as the grade level increases, Malawi faces one of the world’s worst teacher shortages.

More than half of the country’s population lives below the poverty line. Many children enrol and drop out of school frequently due to employment responsibilities at home or illnesses. Especially for many young girls, dropping out is common due to young marriage, pregnancy, and contracting HIV/AIDS.

With around 4.6 million students enrolled in schools throughout Malawi, only 8% of them complete secondary school. A major contributor to this low completion is the lack of proper transportation links to the secondary facilities.”

I was hoping to raise £100 for the Mamie Martin fund, but I am thrilled that my sponsorship is now at £280 and with Gift Aid this rises to £317.50.  To keep a girl at a boarding secondary school costs £350;  I am hoping to get at least that amount, so as the end is now in sight, please think about sponsoring me, because every little helps.

“It’s where we go, 
     and what we do 
          when we get there, 
               that tells us who we really are.”
Joyce Carol Oates 

https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/MaureenIles

P.S.  If you have read this far and you are still wondering, the young lady's name is:

TERESA GREEN - get it?  Trees are Green!

P.P.S.  Apologies for not commenting yesterday, and it was a shame that England lost last night - but I quite enjoyed the game.