Blog

Though the EC may be a bit more distant in kilometers for us, we’re working hard in the Americas to bring the EC mindset ever closer.  The Americas moreEC Raffle was the first activity carried out across South, Central, and North America.  Despite plenty of logistic and linguistic challenges of organizing a raffle between 12 countries, we managed to have all the numbers in a hat in time for Lama Ole to draw the winning number on Dec. 11^th at Karma Dechen Ling in Uruguay.

Jeff Saunders of Minneapolis, USA, was pleasantly shocked to hear his number 2768 was the winner!  Jeff +1 will get to enjoy the grand prize of the raffle: a tour for two through our Buddhist heritage in Bhutan with Maggie Lehnert.  The rest of us couldn’t be luckier that Jeff won—he’s a professional cameraman and filmmaker and has already promised to document and share his journey with the rest of us.

In addition to the main prize, our friends from Perú spontaneously donated a course in Lima next year. The winner of this prize is 4241 -María José Dufourg from Guatemala.

After accounting for the prize expenses, the raffle managed to raise over $25,000 USD in profit for the Europe Center.  A big thank you to our raffle coordinators and the entire network of Americas keypeople who made this possible.