We, along with Colombo 2nd Branch, put together 300 newborn kits for destitute mothers at the DeSoysa Hospital.
In each newborn kit, there were 2 blankets, 4 diapers, a gown, a hat and booties, soap, and diaper pins.
I’ll grant you, not elaborate. But enough for a bit of a start.
And, as much as possible, color coordinated. Blue diapers with blue blankie with blue gown with blue hat and booties. Or pink. Or Green. Or yellow.
And no, I do not know why my brain felt it necessary to capitalize Green. I only know that I did so. Maybe it’s too many ER reruns?
Because some diapers were purchased and some were sewn from the 20 bolts of fabric that were purchased for this project, you can imagine that we came out a little uneven in the counting of the thing.
Well, and in all fairness, some of the blankets were sewn from those same bolts of fabric. But see, when you buy a bolt of fabric, and it’s supposed to contain, let’s say, 80 yards of fabric, it may actually contain 74 or 90.
In our case, given that we had SOOOOO many leftover blankets and diapers, I’d venture to guess that our bolts erred on the side of the larger number.
Anyway. You can see we had towers of diapers and blankets – it was pretty funny! We set up an assembly line as we stuffed 4 of this, one of that, two of that, and so on and so forth into plastic baggies that we passed down the line. Bottlenecks formed, and we called on people to Man Your Post Better!
I started off in diapers, moved to hats and booties, was promoted to soap and pins, and finally became a closer.
The closer was probably the toughest job I had. Those bags required nerves of steel and fingers tough as nails.
Finally, we got the job done – and I was amazed at how quick it was, too!
So we had refreshments – butter cake, cookies, mango cordial, and seven-up – while we waited for the vans to arrive to take the lot to the DeSoysa Hospital where they would be handed out.
