there's no place like gnome.

Here is an article I wrote for the Dawson Sentinal, the local paper, detailing our health kit drive:

On Sunday, February 7, the Sunday school children, confirmation students, and members of Grace Lutheran Church worked side-by-side to assemble health kits for Lutheran World Relief (LWR).  With all of the helping hands and willing participants, it took only 45 minutes to put together 334 health kits!  For the next step in the journey, the kits will be taken to a warehouse in St. Paul, then to be shipped to the people who need them most.

LWR collects the health kits – a bundle of one hand towel, one washcloth, a toothbrush, comb, metal nail file, bar of soap, and six band-aids – year round but recently, after the devastation of the Haiti earthquake, issued a plea for more kits.  This non-profit organization ships health kits, sewing kits, school kits, and quilts to our neighbors in need across the globe.  The health kits are designed to aid refugees – those people who must leave their homes quickly – or to those people who lose their belongings in tragedy, like our neighbors in Haiti.

Thank you to the community of Dawson, the congregations of Baxter/Saron, and the congregation of Grace Lutheran for the donations received in order to fill 334 health kits!  A big thank you as well to those businesses that donated toothbrushes, combs, and nail clippers!  It has been wonderful to see what a community can do to reach out to others that we know need our help and our love.

If any of you are still interested in donating, Grace Lutheran has enough soap, toothbrushes, band-aids, washcloths, and combs to make at least 50 more kits!  We just need 50 new hand towels (dark colors preferred) and 50 metal nail files/nail clippers with files to make that possible!  If you are able to donate either of these items, please drop them off at Grace Lutheran.  Thank you!

We sat around the table at our staff meeting.  We were about to begin a campaign to collect the needed items for LWR health kits and decided we needed a goal.  We all thought silently for a minute.  One person said 50.  Another said 500.  I was thinking 100.  Someone else suggested 200.  We were all over the board and finally decided 250 would be our goal.  Perhaps a little high but that’s where we would aim.

That meant 250 hand towels, 250 nail files, 250 washcloths, 250 combs … you get the point.  Lots of donations, boxes, and bags were dropped off throughout the next few weeks.  It was announced on the radio.  Pastor Lori collected at her country parishes.  We were determined to meet our goal. This is what our collection looked like when I left for home at the end of January:

Upon my return a week later, I was completely and wonderfully overwhelmed with all of the donations that had come in.  We decided we should probably have a count or at least a rough estimate of what we had and what we still needed.  Perfect job for my third graders – they were excellent counters.  Look at those bars of soap in piles of ten!

Even after we counted, donations continued to be put outside the office door and dropped off at Grace.  We set up fellowship hall for optimum assembly line production and prepared for the chaos of sunday school kids, confirmands, and coffee drinkers in the midst of health kit packing frenzy.  It pretty much was pure chaos with a small bit of organization mixed in but the result was utterly impressive.  We have boxes and boxes of health kits, wrapped together with rubber bands, ready to be dedicated and taken to the St.Paul warehouse.  

Total count: I’ll let you know once I’ve counted.  (Estimating 281.)