The last few days I took a diversion from my normal work to help out a worthy cause — my wife!  But she’s helping out an even worthier cause — OSSO.

OSSO is the Orphanage Support Services Organization, a nonprofit group that sends volunteers, supplies, and money to help orphans in Ecuador.  Before we were married, Kelsey spend 9 months in Cuenca, Ecuador volunteering for OSSO.  Shortly after we were married, we returned to Ecuador and lived there for 6 months.  While I did some of the early work on One Shore and came up with the QA Site idea, she did more volunteer work at some of the orphanages —  working with, though not a part of, OSSO.

Kelsey got pregnant, we returned to the USA, I took a job, she had the baby, and then I got laid off.   I’m doing freelance web development and test consulting now.  We thought about returning to Ecuador, but decided to stay in Seattle through the summer so I could work on my business here.

In the meanwhile, however, OSSO is in desperate need of both volunteers and donations.  We gave what we could, but we’re strapped too.  My wife came up with an idea, though.

She likes to make crafts (but doesn’t like to call them crafts.)  So far she’s made dozens of little blankets, toys, baby clothes, etc.  Mostly she gives them away to friends.  But the other day, she decided to open a shop on a website for crafts called Etsy at foxfish.etsy.com and donate all the proceeds of her sales to OSSO.  I helped her create a website for her project at foxfish.org.

I installed Silverstripe CMS for her to be able to edit the site herself, including the gallery and ecommerce modules, as well as the hidemailto module I blogged about previously.  We chose a nice theme by Nivanka Fonseka at whynotonline.com.  I spend some time digging into the internals of the ecommerce module to try and set up inventory management and shipping calculations, as well as fixing (hack) some layout issues with the sunflower theme and ecommerce.  I’ll be diving into the ecommerce module more, fixing some bugs, and possibly working with the Silverstripe team on their Google Summer of Code project.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing the past few days.  Kelsey’s been finishing up a bunch of crafts, and putting them on Etsy and setting up her website. We’re just about ready to launch.

If you know someone who likes crafts check out her site and Etsy shop.  Even if you don’t, but would like to help orphans, check out OSSO.  They could really use help, especially volunteers.  And I can attest that Cuenca is quite nice this time of year — 70 degrees and sunny pretty much year round.