The Big Finale - part 1

I didn’t have time to do a good job on night for Saturday’s blog post because I was tired. I was going to have my friend and her husband come over at 6 AM to help, so I could not stay up late.

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We had to make an appointment as to when we were going to take our packages to the meeting point. We did not take them directly to the families - we had a handler that we worked through. This took a lot of pressure off of us, actually. The volunteers took the packages from our vehicles and put them in one place and then various other volunteers - sometimes firemen, sometimes soldiers, something just simply people delivered the packages to the homes.

We made an appointment to meet at 9 am on Sat. at a place about 20 minutes from us to take the packages for 3 families. At 2:30 pm we were to take the packages for the family who was our number 1 family and then we took our other two families’ packages at 4 pm to the warehouse in Otwock.

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But before we took them to these places, everything had to be in boxes and preferably wrapped up to look pretty.

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I had bitten more than I could chew, so I asked a friend if she could help me wrap. I figured I was going to have to miss a night of sleep - which is not my normal mode of operation - if I were going to have everything in boxes.

In the end, we did what we could. I learned a whole lot through this. This was my first time in doing this particular action.

I had each family divvied up in our living/dining room so hopefully I wouldn’t get them mixed up. Of course, one of my problems was that I hadn’t completely cleaned out the quilts from the living room - as I’ve been washing quilts, I have them there until I get pictures of them and can get them taken to the church building til I give them away. i tried to pile them off to the side for the wrapping time, but they were still there.

One of the things that I was concerned about as I began to see how much I really did have was that I didn’t have enough boxes. I did hear about a place in a town not too far from us that sells boxes. I sent my husband out there on Friday and thankfully, while you are supposed to order boxes ahead of time, when Mike went in, they had some boxes what worked perfectly for the food - which was often heavy! Think flour, sugar, rice, canned veggies.

I will say that as I write this on Sunday afternoon, I am overwhelmed with fatigue. Yesterday I was going a bit on “Adrenalin” - even into the evening. Today it is gone.

In it wanted to share with you pictures of what the packing action looked like.

It was a mess.

Take a look!

 
 
 


The entire action was from Friday afternoon through Sunday at 2 pm where they were taking packages to over 14,000 families in Poland.

We filled 6 of those families’ needs and many of their wants.

I will admit that when I first heard of a these types of Christmas actions here in Poland, I thought it was strange to have “food” be part of that present as I had never thought of food as being a present. But if you don’t have it - it surely is!! (They don’t do “food stamps” here in Poland.)

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After you take a good look at the mess I had brought into my house, I suppose you can see why I was tired!! :) LOL

Ewa and I got all three families’ packages ready to go for Saturday at 9 by the time she left on Friday evening about 10 pm. Then, while her husband and mine loaded up those packages into vehicles on Saturday, we worked on packing up the rest of the families’ things - we didn’t have a whole lot to do - but we did have some more. We did manage to finish - even if all the boxes didn’t end up that pretty!

I’ll cover the actual taking of the boxes to their places tomorrow. Take the time to check out all the pictures!

Check back tomorrow for the rest of the story!

Have a great day wherever you are reading this! Stay safe!




Becky Petersen11 Comments