reynardo | A busy afternoon

About two weeks ago,

lederhosen spotted a tweet and passed it to me.

Mums for Refugees collecting non-perishable goods for the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre in the Northern Suburbs of Melbourne

So I of course put my hand up. There was a drop-off point just down Munro Street, and I dropped in to ask what they needed. They apparently had plenty of nappies, so toiletries would be good. But more importantly, I left my details, because while we can't afford a lot at the moment, I do have some time that could be handy.

This week I got a text - could I help by picking up anything left on doorsteps for two of the locations, as their people would be away and they didn't want things piling up.

So yesterday I ran past and collected tins of tomatoes and packets of baby wipes. Today I grabbed the lovely Archie, and we hit the two locations again, almost collapsing under the pile of tuna and nappies and bags of groceries. Then we headed for the house I'd been to before, to meet up with Eleisha and Lara and Boyd and a bundle of other volunteers. Three other car loads of goods were being delivered, and we offloaded ours then headed into the back room.

I should mention at this point that Eleisha had said before that her back room was fairly large so we could use it to store and sort things. None of us quite realised how much there would be...

Wow.

We started by making a pathway through to the back where the nappies were, and allocated different areas for different products. A good 90 minutes of hard lugging, box-piling, tin-wrangling, wipe-piling and "Has anyone got a middle sized box? This pasta is trying to escape!" and we had reduced the disaster to sorted heaps of heaps.

Mind you, we realised about halfway through that we would need two vans to take all this to Footscray.

And this is us in the middle. You can see we have nappies a-plenty, as well as tuna enough for a feast, tinned tomatoes galore, and many many other lovely things.

And love. All the people who gave, the people who drove, the people who lugged and the people who sorted added a load of love for their fellow human beings. I think that will help a lot too.

I fall over now pls?