Traveling to and from the tea fields has helped me understand so much about our world and the gap betw5een rich and poor. I am grateful to be an American and so thankful to be able to share a fair trade business model with tea workers in Sri Lanka, India and Africa.

There is a place in my heart that yearns to help the children more and more, and that yearning took a turn last year when I was thinking of ways to help the Sri Lankan children of the tea workers. You see, a tea worker makes about $1.35 a day and plucks 16,000 times in order to earn that $1.35. I looked around and wondered how I could help shift the tide. Fair Trade was a great model, but I wanted to do more.

Gnana, the tea estate manager at the plantation where most of the tea for Zhena’s Gypsy Teas come from (and where they threw my wedding!), told me once that when the “Children are laughing, we know the tea will be good.” That statement never left me, and I became more and more aware of the joy of the plantation children with each visit. It became part of me, and I dreamt of it and asked the universe what I could do to help.

On my last trip there, Gnana took me to the computer learning center they had built with fair trade dollars and showed me how much the young children were learning — graphic arts, excel, research and learning how to automate spreadsheets to create an easier time of making sense of the organic yields they produced. The young women were glowing with pride. But I was struck by the fact that for the 530 children who live in this tea estate, there are only 3 computers. I wondered how I could afford to buy them more computers and went back to the States with that question in my mind.

One day, I was cleaning out an old box from my office and found my old MAC laptop. It still worked, it was in pretty great condition, and I realized that even though I didn’t have the funds to buy new laptops for the kids, I could send donated laptops — if I had one lying around, I was certain other people did too. It costs money to recycle a laptop — but if they donated them to my project, I could get them fixed up with the newest software and new hard drives (which only cost like $20) and ship them to the kids and they could use them at the computer learning center and even take them home to teach their mother’s — our tea workers — how to use a computer!

I sent a note out on Facebook and got 15 computers donated right away. Thomas contacted his IT guy at Right Click in Ojai and he offered to clean them up for $20 each — and suddenly a non-profit was born! I incorporated as Educate Her, Inc. because the URL was available and also because the girls in developing countries often are not offered the same educational opportunities as the boys. We are taking donated laptops and getting them to the children — both girls and boys.