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This is Trudi Marie Thomas

For those of you new to this blog let me give some details.

Our Daughter Trudi, was hit while jogging in January 2007. She was an avid jogger and outdoors person. Nature and she were very connected. . It took 24 hours for us to learn of the accident as she carried no ID with her. Arriving at the hospital we learned that she would not live and so as the sun set we took her off life support and she slipped away.

As the months went by I felt I needed to do something in her memory.

The idea of a scholarship in her name kept coming to me. How, I wondered, would we accomplish this as we were just an ordinary family with no rich uncles to lean on. Trudi was a senior at the University of Utah and would have graduated the summer of that year.

Her accident and death had affected the whole community as she was hit in front of the West Bountiful city hall and the elemertary school.

Word got out of what we wanted to do and we were approached the city Arts council proposing that if we organized a 5K as part of the Founders Day celebrations we could have the money we raised for the scholarship fund.

Never having done anything like that before we jumped in blindly. We approached, in person, all the businesses we could in West Bountiful asking for donations. The response was overwhelming.

We are half-way to our goal and this year will be the third year we have done this.

One of Trudi's dreams after she graduated was to go to Africa and teach school. This was a passion of hers and she talked about often. The accident and her death left it as an unfilled dream.This year Scott, her eldest brother, became involved with a volunteer group that goes to Kenya and builds school in the poverty regions there. As time drew near for his departure he asked if we had any left over shirts from last years 5K that he could take. Clothing was not on the list of donations requested as the organization did not want there not to be enough for all and did not want to leave a child without.Scott explained about Trudi and was allowed to give them to the children of one school. He then talked to the children about Trudi, what had happened to her and her dream. He encouraged them to get as much schooling as they could to thus keep Trudi's dream alive.Here are some of the pictures of the kids and the t-shirts.

Africa