Four young women from Menindee Central School. a remote school in Australia are about to embark upon a journey.

They are going to impress you with their tenacity, amuse you with their humour and down-right astound you with their insights into this wide world we live in.

Being in a remote part of Australia (one that is much smaller than that icon suggests), we don't have access to many modern delights in town; no fast-food chains, cinemas or large shopping centres. We do have plenty of bonfires, family, footy games and freedom though!

Sometimes however, we don't get the same opportunities as the schools on the coast or in bigger towns. Our access to Japanese resources like, Japanese speakers, ingredients, manga/anime stores or Japanese film festivals are almost non-existent. This lack makes it really difficult for the students who learn Japanese to understand what it is like in Japan or why learning Japanese is relevant to them, even if they do enjoy the process.

One day, the topic of an excursion to Japan was broached. 

Now, Japan is a really long way from Menindee and not all of our families can afford the luxury of sending their child overseas, no matter how great the opportunity may be. Fundraising within the community is a great solution and one that we will be working on but with such a tiny population and so many great ventures occurring around town, there are only so many times we can ask for donations before we bleed pockets dry. So, we've had to get creative.

Since we can't fundraise solely from the local community we've decided to take the fundraising to the global community.

Travelling is after all, a global venture.

We've reached out to Pink Pangea, an online community for women who love to travel. In partnership with Pink Pangea we will be creating online content in the form of monthly blogs which will bring allow the readers of Pink Pangea to share in our unforgettable journey. In return, Pink Pangea is kindly supporting our enterprising young ladies by promoting our project our Pozible campaign.

So here we are. We are determined. We are motivated. You can count on that!
The question is, can we count on you?
                    

Links you should click

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The grand total of our Excursion is $16, 450. This covers the costs of transport to Sydney, flights, accommodation in Japan, insurance, food and entrance fees to museums, workshops and attractions for four students and two staff members.

The students are being charged $300 each and some fundraising activities will be held within our community.

What we need the online community to help us cover are primarily flights and accommodation for the students. A breakdown of costs is as follows:

Return Flights
Based on the prices retrieved in August of 2015, the expected cost for a return flight per person is $1,300. This brings the expected total cost for return flights to $5,200.

Accommodation
There will be three locations in which we will be staying; Sydney, Osaka and Kyoto. Each accommodation will be sourced based on its cost and location to attractions. An estimated budget was created based on some research into budget hotels in these locations and the expected total cost for 8 nights accommodation comes to $3,100

Any funds raised over the $8,300 amount we are asking for will be used to fund other aspects of the trip including the rail and bus tickets, food, travel insurance and entrance fees for the various places of interest we will be visiting.


Any funds raised over the total amount required for the excursion as a whole be set aside to ease the fundraising load of other school excursions. As part of our school retention and behaviour policy, there are a number of excursions that are annual events such as the Big Day Out for the primary students (an excursion to the nearest large town for some fun and learning), Schools Spectacular for secondary students meeting the school's expectations and annual cultural trips for Year 11 and Year 12. The fundraising that takes place for some of these excursions can be terribly draining on our small community so any funds that can be raised to assist are always appreciated.

                   
The greatest challenge that we foresee for this project is a lack of support.

To combat this we have enlisted the support of Pink Pangea to help build a following of travellers who are invested in seeing young women achieve their travel goals. Through our online content, the readers of Pink Pangea will be able to follow our journey and see world through the eyes of excited youth. We hope to build a rapport with the online community and to show our girls that they can be a part of something bigger. Hopefully this will inspire not just our girls to travel but many other young women to do the same.

To maintain support and enthusiasm as well as a sense of community, we will be launch a blog, MCSInJapan and an Instagram account by the same name. Though these vehicles, we will be able to share our experiences, photographs, videos and language learning.