Winter has come to England too and our team of volunteers who sort
the clothes and goods, here in Lincolnshire, that are going to go to Armenia in the next container have
finally gone home. Its already dark and
cold but they didn’t leave too long ago.
I don’t get much time to get involved in the packing of the container
goods but I love going outside sometimes to see what has been packed and I love
looking through the lovely neat boxes – all neatly labeled with their contents
and their country of origin. Our patient
volunteers not only have to categorise all the clothes eg. Teen’s clothing, but
they have to separate them according to whether they originate in India, China
or Spain!
I ventured outside recently to see what
sort of things have been packed. The
most enormous orange teddy bear (it wouldn’t fit in an apple box and had to go
into a huge bag!); a set of knitted toys in the shape of vegetables – an
aubergine, sweetcorn etc; handmade quilts covered in little animals; a new
duvet; lots of schoolbag equipment; a lovely cherry coloured adult bike; four
or five shiny crutches and so on.
Michael has spent a couple of days so far
this week weighing and labeling some of the boxes and preparing them for
shipment. We are estimating that we must
be near completing enough boxes for the next load! This will be an exciting moment.
As I said in my last blog the village clubs
have now been shut and on December 3rd the club in the village of Baghramian
(just outside Yerevan)
will be doing their Christmas presentation and shutting. We got a phonecall last week reminding us
that Christmas presents are needed to give to about 120 children in the Yerevan and Baghramian
clubs. We were so thankful when we were
able to ask the ladies who work in our warehouse in Yerevan and they were able to put together
lovely gifts from the container that arrived in the summer. We only had to spend some money on sweets and
also to buy aftershave for the teen lads (as nothing suitable was found for
them). Imagine how much more we would
have had to spend if we had to buy toys, colouring pencils etc all there!
By the way, in talking to one of the
leaders of the children’s clubs about these presents I learnt the rest of the
story that I related in my last blog. I
told you that we had to shut the village club as the children were all jogging
round the room during the lesson as they were so cold. At the end of the club the leaders made the
announcement that due to the severe cold they had decided to shut the club and
would not be returning next week. Some
of the little children immediately stopped their jogging and turned with teary
eyes to the leaders “Oh no, please come, please come back. We promise not to be cold, we won’t be
cold. See – already we are not
cold!” Apparently as they said this
their teeth were chattering with the cold!
That touched us to the heart!
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