Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Kim

I pull up Kim's blog and there is a picture of this Carib indian with her grass cutter that lives back in the jungle of St Vincent. The folks that live where I visited while on the island advised that I should not venture there. This must have been before Kim decided to become my daughter.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Dumping

Last week at Sager Brown was the best. It started by unloading two semi trucks full of kits on Monday. The volunteers would carry it out box by box, stack it on pallets of 28 boxes each and Charley and I would hall it away by fork lift. My boss, the normal fork lift operator had to be absent on Monday. We finished with 90 pallets holding 2520 boxes with 45,360 kits worth over
$ 1,000,000. This was donated by several church memberships in Iowa.

On Tuesday we started transferring the kits to larger more accessible large boxes that would hold approximately 250 kits. This is called dumping. Charley would then place the large boxes
on shelves with a fork lift for other volunteers to check for proper content.

I had a dumping crew of eleven, mostly female. Cynthia, Sue, Deb, Jan, Nancy, Allison, Mary, Bob, Harvey, Dennis and Chuck. We were able to complete dumping all the boxes by Friday noon.

At lunch on Thursday I announced how well my team was doing was preforming and as a reward
I was offering free hugs the rest of the week. The response from my team was great, starting during lunch time.

The Iowa team said I could come back as a member of their group next year since I wasn't invited back as a long term volunteer. They stay only for only one week. They bring two semi truck loads every year.

It was a great and rewarding week. I have a hard time keeping a dry eye every time I think about my team.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Moving On

Today is the anniversary of the Longest Day,June 6, 1944. We give thanks to those who were there.

Spend most of my time organizing the material that goes into the kits that are assembled here. It was a real mess but now its not. Its much easy to deposit new material where it goes and much easier to find the material when you need it.

Visited the bayou yesterday at nine AM and the tide was coming in. Visited the bayou at noon and the tide was coming in. Visited the bayou at three PM and the tide was coming in. The tide was carrying the islands of green foliage. The new interesting thing I saw was an egret or two riding up the bayou standing on the islands. Lazy birds.

We will spent part of the week packing for the trip home next Friday. We were not ask to return next year and will probably not be returning again. Next year will be a different place at a different time doing a different activity. They're going to miss me I think.