Elie Mundima

Category: Happy Hollow Zoo | Date: Mar 31 2007 | By: admin

Vanessa from Happy Hollow Zoo has kindly sent me more photos of their very successful evening, when they managed to raise more than $13,000 to pay for the wages of my men in the Advance Force of the Congo Rangers.

I am still so amazed by the tremendous support that can come from those outside Congo, and truly feel we have stepped into a new era here in the park.

The rest of this post is from Vanessa:

To give you more of a feel for the area, this is the outside of the Historic Hotel, with the two WildlifeDirect posters outside on stands:

And inside is the entrance to the Historic Hotel Lobby:

I want to show you the array of auction items we had available:

On the left (orange) was a painting of an Orangutan, Cheyenne, at the Houston Zoo -their Pongos Helping Pongos Program. The basket was donated from a local group - Virunga Artisans Group. The Masai head piece and necklace - from Elena one of the Zookeepers. The purple and blue painting was created by our resident group of Meerkats -it was a very popular item.

And here is Mike, the auctioneer, and Elena holding up the Jaguar oil painting for the live auction portion:

Kelley and Monica bartending - this is actually a sweet and ice-cream shop at the hotel that we converted for our purposes.

Janice with one of the many animal cookies. Kerry, Zookeeper, made an incredible array of animal cookies and hand decorated all of them at night after work. They were a huge hit, in fact, guests offered to buy them! There were hippos, giraffes, crocs, kudos and a monkey with a red bum!

Oriki Theater Drummers. Awesome!!

Jonathan’s handy work at the end of the auction table;

A better idea of the poster placement:

Jonathan, I think we could have even auctioned off your mounted posters - the guests loved them and it really brought the story home.

And finally, here is Jesse, Mark and Monica.

The event was over and a great time was had by all!

Technorati : Congo, Congo Rangers, Happy Hollow Zoo, WildilfeDirect