After a long journey which ended in missing luggage, I have arrived back in Chausy. As we were driving from Minsk to Chausy yesterday Dave called and said he was also on his way to Chausy … with 3 of our 6 containers to unload! So after 24 hours of travelling we met at School Number 1 to begin the unloading at 5:30 PM. It took us until 11 PM and we had lots of local help, but we managed to get all 3 unloaded. The third one was completey filled with tide donated by P&G and the gang was getting pretty tired by the end of it.

Here are a few members of the chain gang:

Some of the tide is in small 2 KG boxes, there are over 5,000 of them in this photo:

This morning when we returned to the school the first order of business was to get organized. this means sorting family parcels by location and putting boxes together in piles for individual families:

Neil Matheson, who heads up the “Guardian Angel Program”, helps to organize his boxes by placing photos on the outside. It also acts as a reminder of all of the people that are being helped:

Although we put the Tide into the gym a large portion of it is destined for the Chausy Orphanage (3,700 actually). We would have delivered it directly there but Customs insisted it all go into the one location first. This morning Vitalli, the orphanage director, showed up with a lot of kids and utilized the “Hope for the Future” truck that was purchased by a consortium of North American truck companies led by Mark Seymour of Kriska Transport. Here is a shot of them loading the truck:

Here is a good picture of the truck. It is a nice Mercedes truck with an excellent “lift gate”:

Since the load was so heavy, we had to do two loads with the truck and the third was done using the tractor and wagon that was purchased for the orphanage last year through the fund raising efforts of Margaret and David Campbell of Ridgetown, Ontario:

On the school grounds is a memorial to local boys/men who died in the Afghanastan war in the 1980’s, this one struck me as he was only 19 years old … the same age as my oldest son who is here with me on this trip. It is also interesting to note that we currently have a lot of Canadians in Afghanastan right now!

This is my first post for this years trip. Unfortunately the internet cafe will not be open again until Tuesday. In the meantime I will take pictures, make notes and post again Tuesday.

Eric

PS: For all family members of Canadians currently in Belarus – everyone is fine and working hard!