Helping Charity:Water

Yesterday, I got the chance to be able to volunteer my time at Charity:Water to help them pack, organize and load donated supplies into trucks that would be loaded onto a plane bound for Partners in Health located on the ground in Haiti. A few thoughts from that day.

• When you give people the opportunity to help out, it’s amazing what people will do. I heard the founder of Charity:Water say that they were only anticipating 1 truck worth of stuff, however, 4 trucks were needed in total. And that was only after they stopped taking donations.
• Also, three different people really stuck out in mind. The first was the UPS worker that made a delivery to the loading dock that we were using. She decided that she would take her lunch break and helped out for an hour.
• The second was a guy from the janitorial service at the building that saw what we were doing and decided to help out as well.
• The third, and most somber, was a security guy from the building, who said that his nephew and his nephew’s son and daughter were caught in the earthquake and that they have not been heard from. It reminded me what we were doing.
• I am pretty obsessed with efficiency. And I couldn’t help but think about how INefficient it was to take water that was bottled and placed in a box and shrink wrapped, stack those boxes of bottles on a wood palette, tape those boxes together, shrink wrap them, load them into a truck to load them onto a plane. Not to mention how much $$ would be used to ship the weight of that water on the truck and on the plane. I kept thinking is this really the best way for us to help them? And that is the moment that I realized what a HUGE commodity H20 is worldwide. “Liquid Gold” as the charity:water people put it.

Here are some pictures from the stuff we did that I was able to snap with my iPhone.