It was a long night and the most difficult container to load but the 6th and final container is now loaded and ready for it’s long voyage to Belarus. The 6 containers will be hauled by truck to the Port of Montreal where they will be loaded on a ship. Once across the ocean they still have a long land trip across Europe to Belarus and, with any luck at all, will be waiting for the delegation to arrive in Chausy! Of course there is Canada Customs and Belarus Customs to deal with at either end of the journey and that in itself is no small feat!

This 6th container has lots of stuff for two destinations, the Chausy Orphanage and the Chausy Hospital. There were a lot of odd shaped items in this load making it complicated and time consuming. In this picture it may look like we have discovered a stow-away, but in actual fact Alex had crawled in underneath some stuff and we passed in packages of Bounty to stuff in and fill all the holes.

Once everything for the orphanage was loaded we squared off the section with boxes of (much needed) toilet paper to divide it from the hospital delivery:

Once we had everything loaded for the hospital (another lot of odd sized stuff) and the load was deemed full …

… our loaders decided they could fit in a few more boxes so Dave rounded up some boxes of infant clothing and they managed to stuff in … 27 more boxes!!! Now that’s a load!

Without giving away any secrets I noticed some pretty cool stuff in there for the Orphanage and I can’t wait to get to Chausy to see the faces on the kids when we unload this container!

I may post the odd update between now and then, but make sure you “tune-in” to this website from March 29 to April 12 for ongoing updates of our deliveries and experiences with our friends in Belarus!

Eric

The piles in the warehouse are getting smaller and we are down to one container left to load (tomorrow, Monday Feb 25 at 6:30 PM)! It is an activity that is often overlooked and underappreciated but it is as important as the delivery in Belarus. If we don’t get it loaded in Canada, it does not get delivered in Belarus and the accuracy of the inventory is critical to enable the delivery to happen at all! Loading involves more than just lugging! We have had people sorting, palletizing, inventorying, wrapping, labelling, cleaning up and many more jobs than even I am aware of!

Here are some shots from today’s important work:

Ed and Murray have been there everyday driving the fork trucks for us. Here is Ed hard at it:

and here is Murray:

Here are some of the guys loading:

Here are two more guys waiting for another pallet load:

Here is some of the gang taking a well deserved “Timmy” break:

Here is container number 4 all loaded and ready to go:

and here is number 5:

And for all you guys who spent your day INSIDE the containers here is what they look like on the outside just waiting to go!

One left to go … hope to see you tomorrow night!

Eric

Well we didn’t load any containers today but we had a long day organizing and inventorying everything to prepare for tomorrow. We set up areas for each final delivery location and then sorted the boxes, palletized them, inventoried them and put them in the final location. This will make loading the containers very quick tomorrow as well as much easier to control the inventory. It is critical to have an accurate inventory or we can end up tied up with Customs in Belarus, this would be a big problem as we have a limited time to deliver when we are there.

Here are some pictures of 3 of the location. The first is for the Chausy Orphanage:

This is for the Chausy Hospital:

and this long line is for Invalid Children and there families:

Tomorrow we are hoping to load two containers simultaneously and really need lots of help. If we get enough people it should only take a couple of hours. If you are available please be at the East end of the Kriska Warehouse in Prescott for 10 AM.

Eric