Day 18 ❦ Give and others can give

DAY 18

The Gift - A hockey bag

Since I have had my hours reduced significantly at work, I have dedicated Fridays to volunteer service and spend most of my time working on Rotary projects. Rotary International has given me so many opportunities to serve both here in Minnesota and throughout the world. This spring I returned from my second work service trip to West Africa sponsored by Rotary International. Volunteering my time now is only one of the small ways I can give back to Rotary for what I have received. Today I am meeting with a woman who will be leading a team of educators to Ghana, one of the countries in which I spent time.

When I meet with Judy, I am armed with contact names and numbers of people who can assist her when she is in Ghana. I show her some of my pictures and we talk about her itinerary. Then I give her the traveling hockey bag. For those of you who do not live in a state that lives and breathes hockey, a hockey bag is the biggest and most durable canvas bag that you can get that still fits in the size limitations required by the airlines. I have found through my travels, that a hockey bag is the perfect bag in which to transport medical supplies to developing countries - and have done so on multiple occasions.

In Minnesota, our Rotary District was fortunate to have a volunteer organization which recycles good, useable and re-usable medical supplies leftover from hospitals called R.H.O.M.S.I.D. They ask Rotarians who are traveling to developing countries to consider taking a bag or two of supplies from their warehouse to give to local doctors and clinics upon their arrival in the country in which they are visiting. The two times I went to Africa, the team that I traveled with stuffed seventy pounds (the airline baggage limit) of medical supplies into the hockey bag (and other bags as well). The cool thing about the hockey bag is that is can hold seventy pounds of gauze, pads, bandages - big bulky items that could never fit into a standard suitcase. Items like stethoscopes, and heavy medical equipment fit well mixed in with clothing, but light, bulky stuff poses a packing nightmare. We have transported four hundred and twenty pounds of much needed medical supplies in two trips in this manner.

The traveling hockey bag was given to me two years ago for my first trip to Africa to transport children’s clothing and medical supplies. We found it worked so well, we decided to use it to load it with gifts for our return to the United States, and just keep giving it to people who were taking R.H.O.M.S.I.D. supplies on their trips. Judy’s team was planning on taking medical supplies with them, so they were gifted our traveling hockey bag.

❦ Give and others can give