It’s been a week - a different kind of week.

We had originally talked about taking the week off from a lot of shopping for Ukraine because we had some other things we needed to focus on. And while doing things for Ukraine is wonderful, it can be all-encompassing and kind of take-over one’s life to the neglect of other necessary parts of life.

Anyway, so this week on Monday and Tuesday I did nothing with regards to Ukraine except try to work on cleaning up part of the living room. I knew that the big load was in the works and while I had all of the quilt packs for the larger quilts made up to current, I wanted to get the living room back in a better shape.

I had some piles of baby quilts (about 20) to make into baby sets, so I did those and put them in boxes and taped them up. I wanted all of these to go on this next load.

By the time I was done with those, my living room had just a walkway. I have pre-ordered many blankets and they have all been arriving - and so my living room is quite full of those.

But, Mike had gotten a phone call from a friend, Tim, who has been here several times already, and he wanted to come back to Poland to go with Mike and take a load into Ukraine. Mike had told him that because of his back/leg situation and the need to take a short break, we were hoping to take this week off. So, Tim asked two other people to do most of the shopping. That took the load off me. He planned to arrive on Thursday and they would take their trip on Friday into Ukraine.

Tuesday was the day that UPS said the shipment would be in according to tracking reports. I figured that meant we should hear from them because of the need to clear customs. On Tuesday we didn’t hear anything.

Wednesday -

We went over to the church building to check on the load that had been collected and Tim’s only concern was that it was a “full load”. We thought maybe it wasn’t really going to be enough as the guess was it was about a ton of food - even though we knew we always add in quilts to finish up the load. But he wanted to take plenty of food as well.

So, I stopped by the wholesale place on Wed. afternoon and put in an order for the next day’s pickup. They were fine with that - it wasn’t quite as large of a load as I’ve gotten the other times because things had to be available overnight.

Also, that day, while we were at the church checking out the situation, my husband got a phone call from UPS this time, asking if we wanted THEM to handle customs or did we want to! The individual boxes had been handled by FedEx - this big load is with UPS.

“Please - you do it.” “Ok, then I need your email address so I can send some forms.”

So my husband sent her the email address. By the time we did the running around and went home, we found the email she had sent. We printed out the various forms they needed and began filling them out. I was able to just bring up the forms from the FED EX boxes we had just worked through and pull numbers off of them and send things back to her. It was a couple of back and forth exchanges on Wed/Thurs/Friday morning.

Thursday -

First thing - I went to the post office to mail a document to UPS that they needed a hard copy of for clearing the load with customs. After that for the most part I completely forgot about taking photos.

I did some shopping for the load going out Friday - while Mike went to the airport to pick up Tim and his daughter, Sarah.

I think I hit up 3 stores during that time. I also took all the food I had purchased in the morning and put it in the garage - which didn’t really look like much as I was looking for specific things - trying to get other things than the stuff that they had already purchased a lot of.

I also during that time took all of the boxes of baby sets over to the church and piled them in a stack ready to go on the load. We were going to load up in the afternoon.

Mike arrived at the house with Tim and his daughter, Sarah while I was out shopping - some time after 11:30am. Eventually I went home and we decided to go to KFC for dinner - not such a good hostess, am I? As long as we could keep our guests busy, they’d be okay with jet lag. If we let them sit at home, it would be bad as they had missed a night’s rest on the way over.

After lunch at KFC, we took both Mike’s truck and the van to the wholesale place to load up vehicles - from what I had ordered the day before. I forgot about pics - the only one I took was of these packages of laurel leaves - we bought all the store had. (It’s a small wholesale place - so this is about all they had.)

Oh, and in addition to the order I had put in, Tim kept adding in more and more stuff - including buying all the salt they had in stock! We ended up buying 410 kg of salt from there.

We had been told the lack of salt in Ukraine is getting urgent, so please bring a LOT of salt - so we (Sarah - Tim’s 14 year old daughter and I) went to a second wholesale place while the men went to the church to start packing up the trailer.

We got another 150 kilos of salt to go to Ukraine at this second wholesale place.

The first photo below shows what the store had - and the rest is what we bought and Sarah loading it in the car while I took photos. I had to do that for her mom who is back in Wisconsin. Not sure how prices compare, but a kilo of salt here is 1.39 PLN which is $0.33 for 2.2 lbs. The whole load (the second picture) was under $50.

Then I went to yet another Lidl to get some more items while the men were still packing up the trailer. In the end, we ended up with TOO MUCH stuff for this load and had to leave some in the garage for the next trip. It was the weight - not the space! Plus - they had brought several bags of stuff to go to Ukraine in their luggage.

After all the food was in the trailer, we brought out 100-150 quilt vinyl packs to put on the trailer and put on top and neatly in the edge.

The men were out until dark looking for a chain saw and other things that were needed in Ukraine - but not entirely successful with finding everything.

Finally we all crashed.

Friday -

They took the load to Ukraine - I had to help take stuff over in the van on Fri. morning after breakfast because the truck was so full of stuff that there wasn’t room for several more boxes of items such as clothing that had been donated that Tim and Sarah had brought from the USA in their luggage, so I had to take it in the van so they could find room for it in the trailer (there was still room above the quilts for these things).

After they (Mike, Tim, Sarah) got off about 8:30, I went to Lidl and picked up a few more things that I noticed were an especially good buy - not their regular items they carry - and picked them up for the next load to Ukraine (bullion cubes and dry milk), plus some things Tim said his wife, Luda, wanted to take back to the USA. Since this was just a quick trip for Tim/Sarah, I knew we needed to do shopping quickly (they leave Monday). So I picked up that kind of stuff while they were on their way to Ukraine.

Eventually I came home, took a shower, and started my day over. :) I decided to take two suitcases to the Jozefow Station where they have a lot of Ukrainian ladies with their children as I had told them I would buy 4 more suitcases for them - as this is a dire need. The ladies there are mostly staying until they can fly to Canada - so they have to work out their passport/visa situations. But when that happens, they need luggage. Pretty much all second-hand donations have dried up by now so I told them I could get them new ones for them to use. I’m getting not expensive ones - about $50 or $60 ones - so they can have something to hold their stuff in as they travel such a long distance. So far only these two have come - still waiting on two more.

About noon, while opening the back of the van to put the suitcases in, I lost my balance and then couldn’t get traction in the somewhat deep sand of the tent which we use as a garage, and I fell backwards, hitting my head on a pole in tent - and coming to rest on the cement base of the pole.

As I was falling - I literally prayed, “Lord, I’m not through yet - Mike won’t like me to leave him with all these quilts to take care of!” It all felt very much like slow-motion. As I lay on the ground, I decided that I must be okay because I could still feel everything and hadn’t lost consciousness. I gingerly reached back to feel the back of my head where I had hit the pole and cement block and didn’t feel any blood.

Good.

Whew. I didn’t feel dizzy either. Also good. “Thank you, Lord!” As of this writing (which is Sunday), I can still feel it where it hurts when touched. I guess it just is bruised. It didn’t even get a huge knot or welt.

The whole experience was a reminder to be more careful!

Friday evening our time, Rachael wrote that she had heard that the load here in Warsaw had ‘cleared customs’ and was free to be delivered! Yeah! That seemed fast to me - I was tickled. (I had been doing the emails back and forth with the lady who was working with me on this, so it is an especially big relief to me!)

I waited up as long as I could before going to bed for them to come back. They didn’t arrive til about 2 am, however. I had managed to stay up til 1 - but finally went to bed. I had been especially concerned because I had hit my head so hard - and had heard that sleeping soon after a fall is bad. However, I figured I just needed to sleep and thought I probably didn’t have a concussion since I seemed to have no signs of one.

Saturday -

Mike took the cardboard in the little trailer to the recycling place so we could start the week out with an empty trailer. It wasn’t fully by any means, but once I start in on big boxes, it will fill up fast. Plus, I wanted the trailer empty so we can use it for the next group of vinyl quilt bundles if we want to. (Turns out Mike wants me to use it for cardboard.)

The rest of the day I did this and that. One of the things I did was to give away another bag of things to a lady named Jadwiga who has a lot of contacts with Ukrainian refugees here in Poland. I passed off some of the ‘less nice’ blankets and throws and comforters (purchased) that have been sent my way - to Ukrainians but here in Poland.

This is now the current status of the room where we have the vinyl bags. I will be looking to pass along some of these to my new contact, Jadwiga, and her contacts in Ukraine.

Just as a reminder - this is what it looked like a week ago - and as I had thought, we did have an avalanche so on Thurs when we went to load up the trailer, it was a lot of work to get the door open!

And that’s about it.

Have a great day wherever you are reading this! Thanks for coming along on this journey with me!

Be sure to check out what my sis has for you in the store here!

Feel free to browse the site.