Calais Day 1

We spent most of the day in the sorting warehouse preparing 'goodie bags'. The first set to be prepred each contained one hat, one scarf, one pair of gloves, two pairs of second hand socks, one pair of new socks, one pair of pants (which could have been new or second hand), one t-shirt, one personal care package containing a toothbrush, toothpaste and soap, one comb, one water resistant poncho and one wind up torch. We made up the goodie bags in small, medium and large sizes using colour coded plastic bags.

The other goodie bags we prepared contained food. These were divided into soft food and hard food goodie bags and were color coded accordingly. The soft food bags contained one loaf of white sliced bread, one orange and one banana. The hard food goodie bags contained 1 bottle of cooking oil, 5 onions, one tin of tuna fish, one tin of haricot beans, one kg of sugar and one litre of milk.

In the afternoon we went to the camp to distribute the food bags.

After a thorough briefing describing how the section of the camp we would be distributing in was the most hostile due to the large number of restaurants in it, the distribution went smoothly and the most trouble we experienced was the odd bit of queue jumping but once the jumpers were told to go to the back of the queue they did so politely and with humour. It was definitely not the wild scrum we had been led to believe it would be. But maybe it was a good day. As it was my first distribution, I have nothing else to compare it to yet.

#sorting #goodiebags #fooddistribution