One of Those Days

Think about one of those times when everything seems to go right. Maybe you find $20 in your coat pocket, hit all green lights on your way to work, and are having a really good hair day. Those days are great, right? Well, hold onto that feeling because this blogpost is not about one of those days. Getting the Florida shipping container has felt more like tearing a big hole in your favorite pants, getting rear-ended in an intersection, and finding out you have ringworm.

When filling shipping containers, Allen and the volunteers are very careful to prioritize the items that have arrived. Highest priority is always given to an item that has been sent by a sponsor for a specific child that they sponsor. Getting those items into the hands of the right children is a promise made to sponsors. We also receive backpacks which are "generic," and can be given to any child, and these are lower in priority. Top priority items are placed on the shipping containers first to reduce the chance that something could happen to them in Customs. While Customs has the absolute authority to go through each item on a container, Sowers4Pastors has never had that happen. Until now.

Each box on the Florida container was examined. The container was almost completely unloaded and re-loaded. When the container arrived in Gracias, it wasn’t a matter of pulling out the neatly packed boxes that had been stacked onto the container in Florida. This is the reason Sowers4Pastors requests that each backpack be individually tagged. It is not enough to merely label a box - as items can be removed from boxes during this process.

Trish described the current scene by saying, “It’s like going into the home of a hoarder and asking, ‘Is the purse I carried at graduation here?’ We don’t know yet what we have and what we don’t have.”

The smallest program that should be receiving designated backpacks is the Sister Church Program for Fredericktowne Baptist Church, with “only” 100 children. In order to tell them what has arrived, Sowers4Pastors would need to sort through each item on the entire container. Then they would be able to check that one group off their list.

In the nicest way possible, sponsors are being asked to not contact Sowers4Pastors to ask if the items they sent are present and accounted for. This is a slow process and there simply aren’t answers to those questions yet. There are some items that were placed on the container in Florida, that haven't yet been located, in this ongoing process.

Please pray for the effort in sorting through the contents of the Florida container. It’s a lot of tedious work, and they need to work fast because the Maryland container is going through customs now. There is a very good chance that it will arrive in the same condition. Remember that Honduras is not the U.S. Trish pointed out that things that shouldn’t happen sometimes do happen. To put it in perspective, Trish said, “We sort of assume that things will go sideways and are thrilled when things go well.”

 - posted by Christi