Donations! (continuation from previous post)

We stayed with the students for awhile as they lined up for the busses, then I noticed that all of the juniors had gotten off somewhere, so went to see. Oh! They were helping unload a huge donation that had arrived during the Buenas Dias. A semi truck filled with food and some clothes. Seeing this, I jumped in and started hauling boxes from the semi to the house.

With all of the second year class (roughly 33 students), the Interna’s (another 12 people), a mix of workers, teachers, and Sisters (about another 10 people), and a few people off the street who saw all the activity and came to help (another 8-10 people) it took us about 4 hours to unload everything from the semi.

But Karina, why did it take so long to unload the semi with 65 people helping? Good question. The answer lies in some of the donations which were enormous boxes filled with dry goods such as pasta and crackers similar to Goldfish crackers.

These could not be lifted as they weigh 10 million lbs. The school doesn’t have pallet jacks and the semi didn’t have any convenient manner to unload these items, so the items inside the boxes had to be transferred to smaller plastic bags which could then be carried inside the house. Yes, this did result in many little goldfish crackers spilling everywhere. And FYI, if you’re going to donate food items, please don’t donate 3 huge boxes of goldfish crackers, they don’t last, have no nutritional value, and the Sister’s are at a loss as to what to do with all of them. The flour, salt, oil, clothes, cookies (of which there are also 10 million),

and granola bars, that were received are all very helpful.