Katutura Sundays

I don’t remember the name of the man who introduced me to Marybeth but I am sure glad he did. It’s become my weekly tradition so spend Sunday with her – twice to go to Joe’s Beerhouse with Marybeth and her interns, and twice to volunteer in Katutura for the afternoon. Today, our task was to unload some more of the infamous German donation container in hopes of finding some children’s clothes. I’d heard Marybeth talk about the container for the past two weeks and even I was surprised at its mass when we pulled up to it.

A charity group in Germany filled an entire shipping container with clothing donations– over 500,000 items. The Germans did such a good job filling the container, though, that Marybeth and her volunteers had no way of getting to the boxes in the back, which they suspected held children’s clothes. Especially since it’s starting to get really cold at night, Marybeth was really hoping to find those boxes of clothes and shoes, but after nearly one month after the container arrived, she had yet to find them.

Some of the boxes were filled with some really beautiful clothes – overstock from department stores, it looked like, all with the tags still on. Most of the boxes in front were men’s clothes, and often in XXL sizes, where small men’s sizes were probably most suitable. It’s amazing gift from the Germans, all these clothes, but I was amazed at the work required on this end. Marybeth and her volunteers have spent countless hours sorting, unloading, unpacking – today, it took seven women over three hours to do just three boxes of clothes. I wish I had my camera to illustrate the scale of this container. We actually had Olivia’s (one of the volunteers) eight-year old daughter climb on top of two crates and get inside the one of the boxes to throw out clothes because it was too heavy for us to move. Each box is nailed to a huge wooden pallet and too massive and heavy to put in a car like that, so we had to empty each box before we could detach it from the pallet. The boxes were usually destroyed when we tried to remove them from the pallet, so we used duvet covers as large sacks and filled them with clothes. It was actually pretty fun climbing on top of boxes and wedging myself between wood pallets in an effort to get to the back of the container. For a while, I joined Olivia’s daughter in the box to throw out clothes so we could move it. Standing inside the box, it came up to my waist. All of this unloading and sorting is just one piece of work that Marybeth puts in to donation distribution. Unloading the container also takes so long because Marybeth personally oversees the distribution of the clothes to make sure it gets to the people who need it. She’s had problems in the past with several works at the charity organizations taking the clothing for themselves or even just storing it unused in a closet somewhere, and only a fraction, if any, to the families in the community. She hates that she needs to exercise this type of oversight, but on a positive note she says it is nice to have a point person who reports back to the donor agencies.
At any rate, it worked out well for us because we got to see the children at Hand in Hand receive the donations. The kids were just adorable. They love the digital camera and seeing their faces on the screen. The little boy in the longsleeve tan was my favourite. The way his eyes lit up when he saw his little face on my camera screen just turned me to mush. He was quiet and shy but held my hand and walked me to the gate when I left.

Leaving Hand in Hand was hard – not just because I had to say goodbye to all the little camera hams, but because I was on “gate duty.” Hand in Hand needed to limit the number of people who came inside the gates to only those that lived in that community, for fear of outsiders overwhelming the building and the local children not getting any of the donations. Though they didn’t advertise the clothing giveaway, a small crowd had gathered outside the security gates while we unloaded the clothes. When we opened the gates to pull out the van, I had to stand at the side and hold back the children to prevent them from sneaking inside. It broke my heart. There were a few mothers holding babies, and a good thirty children no higher than my waist, with bare feet and big brown eyes looking at me sadly for not letting them in.