Last Thursday our volunteers did an incredible job of opening all the mail that had accumulated over two weeks and the mail was cleared and up-to-date by the time they left. This week we did not have a large delivery to open because the Post Office was renovating and unable to issue us our mail – yup, we are not kidding! So, with two new volunteers joining us today, we got through what mail we did have in no time at all. This was the perfect opportunity to sort through the backlog of squares that needed to be made into blanket packs and I am pleased to report that we completely cleared that backlog today and put together more than 200 blanket packs.
WOW - we can see the floor in the sorting room!
It is always such fun, re-visiting all the beautiful squares you send us – have a look at these:
Having caught up on most things operational, has allowed us time to focus on other aspects of the KAS process. Many of you will have received thank you notes via email or will be receiving letters, via snail mail sometime in the future. This is thanks to one of our volunteers, Gina, who together with her daughter Isabella offered to help with all the thank you notes and emails – AND, I am pleased to report that other than today’s letters we are on top of that too! Here are our admin gurus with some of the many letters they worked on this week:
Another concern has been maintaining the KAS database and a lovely friend of Ronda’s, Jeanette, has assisted us with this by splitting the database by country so that a volunteer can take a box of correspondence for a specific country and load that – with this new system, the database will be sorted in no time at all. Isabella spent a large part of today ensuring that all the correspondence has been correctly sorted into the relevant box to be loaded onto the database. We really are blessed with these dedicated friends who clearly have no fear of paperwork!
Now that we have so many blanket packs waiting to be sewn together, we are recruiting volunteers who can assist with this. I hope to be able to report more on this next week and let you know who else “comes on board”.
Each of these bags holds 9 blanket packs ready to be sewn together - this room is full.
As always, our dedicated teams who do sew for us already have returned some magnificent blankets. Take a look at this batch that we received back recently together with some of the completed blankets that arrived in the mail today:
Abegail admiring the colourful blankets.
Elna Otter of the Lindelani Reformatory project in Stellenbosch also reported back this week on their very successful distribution of KAS blankets which were sewn together by the boys at the reformatory who are all under the age of 17. The blankets were distributed at two crèches in the Cape.
Warm and cosy under their KAS blankets.
As always, it has been a very busy week and we looked forward to two distributions planned for next week in Soweto.
So, here is wishing you all a very productive KAS week with love and hugs from the SA volunteers!!!!
From left to right: Anuja, all the way from India with Oti and Trish (another new volunteer); Oti with the lovely matching sets she opened today and lastly Wandi, Oti and Lindi bundling squares. Moss and Matt managed to hide from the camera - Oti on the other hand was not camera shy today!!!!!
Replies
200 blankets in packs - fantastic. Thank you for the hug.
So enjoyed reading this, Wendy, Thank you! Charmian in London.
Also, thank you, Gina, for the lovely note. The personal touch means so much to those of us in the field!
Thanks for a great report. I'm going to print it and post it next to the KAS basket in the waiting room at my chiropractor's office! Must share the photos and good news...
The magic of how a square gets knit/crocheted with love in a far away land, and makes its way to Africa and into the loving hands of volunteers who then sort, deliver and sew those squares together into blankets, then to warm the precious children as they sleep. It just makes my heart so very warm. Thank you for sharing.
That photo of the babies. My heart breaks to imagine them, just a few days ago, having to sleep without a hat, go-over and blanket to keep them warm.
I have read everyone's comments and I agree with the thrill of seeing the photos. Thank you Team Ronda. Cold children get ready to be warm, warm, warm!!! everyone is working as fast as they can.
As you can see we cannot thank you enough for sending us so much information and pictures. They are invaluable to us all and an inspiration to keep up our efforts around the world. Wonderful to see the number of volunteers growing and KAS developing into such a productive and structured setup. Thank you all
Thanks Sharon. There's a whole bunch of mine - you are right about the stars, hearts, and flowers. There's also a blue and beige one with a yellow sun. A rainbow one with black background, and a black and white zebra one. It's a happy feeling to know they made it to South Africa and I can actually see them in the new building :-)
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