Animal Shelter Patron- Helma Schreuder – 20 years of Service

Helma Schreuder has been supporting The Bonaire Animal Shelter for over 20 years. Helma and her late husband Gert, started visiting Bonaire in 1984 for their holidays. In 1992 they moved to Bonaire to reside here. She has a great love for animals and wanted to help in some way. Her idea was to sell T-shirts and use the profit for the Animal Shelter expenses. She approached them with the idea of selling T-shirts but at that time, the shelter was unable to order T-shirts due to lack of funds. Helma took it upon herself to open a bank account, donated the money to buy the T-shirts and set up selling them at various places. In the beginning Divi Flamingo Beach and Habitat were happy to have her set up a table at their happy hours and sell them to their guests. You can now find them also at the cruise ship market tent in Wilhemina Park.

Then she devised another plan for donations by distributing little plastic piggy banks that people could put their spare change into for donations to local stores and businesses. Later little wooden boxes were created by Barbara van Olphen, to replace the piggy banks. Helma took on the responsible of making the rounds to collect the donations and became known as “The Animal Shelter Lady”. This year Janice Huckaby of JanArt Gallery and her volunteer artists, updated the little wooden boxes and repainted them with the new Animal Shelter logo.

Friday, October 26, in appreciation of Helma’s 20 years of service, she was presented with 10 of the newly painted boxes and a T-shirt with the new box design that said “The Money Box Queen “.

Thank you Helma for 20 years of support!