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RICHMONDREVIEW.COM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2013
40 PAGES
Dream Auction’s 12th will be its last Since 2001, it has raised more than $340,000 for the local community. by Martin van den Hemel Staff Reporter The 12th annual Dream Auction fundraiser figures to be a bittersweet affair later this month, as it will be the swan song for the core group of organizers who will be stepping down afterward. Sally Houston has long been one of the driving forces behind the event and together with event chair Susan Johnsen and a handful of others at Gilmore Park United Church have spent much of the last several months planning for the Nov. 30 luncheon at the Vancouver Delta Airport Hotel on Cessna Drive on Sea Island. Houston recalled that before 2001, the Dream Auction was simply a Gilmore Park Church event which raised money for church needs such as stained glass windows and a piano. “Then we decided we needed to be helping people in the community. And we needed to let people know there was poverty in Richmond,” she said. Poverty in Richmond? People couldn’t believe it, said Houston, who for three decades worked as a teacher and saw the innocent face of poverty inside schools. “12 years ago when we started to quote the statistics of the poverty, people didn’t believe us. They thought we were making it up...We both have a long history of watching kids come to school without breakfast.” Houston recalls a little girl coming to school with a lunch pail packed with just the remainder of a partially-eaten apple. “They’d look up quickly and say ‘Oh, mummy forgot to put my lunch in today.’ And I’d say well would you like some soup and crackers. So then I’d take them down to the staff room and we had teachers doing that all the time. We actually saw the empty lunch pails or the empty lunch bags or the kids sitting there fidgetting because they weren’t allowed to go out to play until the actual eating time was over,
Getting ring back may cost couple $236,963 Wife fails to declare impressive diamond gift from her husband after trip to China by Martin van den Hemel Staff Reporter It was an extremely expensive lesson for a husband and wife who didn’t get their stories straight, and one that will likely get him put in the doghouse for quite some time. Last March, Ruo Lin Zhang flew back in to Vancouver International Airport after a trip to China. Employing the handy automated border clearance kiosk, she declared $600 worth of goods purchased outside of Canada. But Zhang was pulled aside by a border services officer for a secondary examination. See Page 3
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Martin van den Hemel photo Dream Auction chair Susan Johnsen, left, and event co-chair Sally Houston will be stepping down from the organizing committee of the annual Dream Auction, which will host its 12th annual fundraiser on the morning of Saturday, Nov. 30 at the Delta Vancouver Airport Hotel.
but they didn’t have anything to eat.” So each year, some $5,000 is directed to the Richmond school district for its breakfast program. At the community meals, it’s not uncommon to see whole families come with children. “These are not people that are shirking their responsibilities. Many of them, two people have jobs, but there is not enough money
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because by the time they pay rent, they don’t have enough money left over for food and some of the other things.” There are some families that go from one community meal to the next from night to night, she said. Johnsen said for impoverished families, their choices are often very limited. See Page 3
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