Trash we don't see, trash we don't recycle.

Here is a scene from the mission where I help serve breakfast once a week.

It's 6 in the morning.  Before the guests come in, the volunteers and workers gather together to pray and eat.  Usually the chefs serve the volunteers, but this past week a new volunteer decides to help serve.  So, I hand my plate over.  "Potatoes, please".  She puts potatoes on my plate.

There is also, as always, oatmeal and also fresh fruit.   Usually, we serve these in styrofoam bowls -- the plates are washable, but washable bowls disappeared years ago (tossed in trash cans?  taken in people's backpacks? not sure), so oatmeal and fruit and such go in styrofoam.

I ask for oatmeal in one of the washable mugs instead of in a styrofoam bowl.  She puts the oatmeal in the mug.  Then I say, "could you put the fruit directly on my plate?"   The volunteer gives me a chipper, "why certainly!", and she puts the styrofoam bowl of fruit right on my plate.

The chef, behind her, intervenes.   "No,  Miser Mom doesn't want a bowl; just put the fruit on her plate".  The volunteer is now bewildered; she looks back and forth between the chef and me.  She wants a bowl of fruit on her plate, but she doesn't want a bowl on her plate . . . ?  The chef takes the ladle, scoops up some fruit, and puts the fruit on my plate.

**

It's scenes like these that remind me how differently I see the world than so many other people do.  Things that are invisible to other people scream out at me.  Trash!  Danger!

So in case you've missed it, I just want to point out another recent story about why recycling is not The Golden Answer to sustainable living.   Recycling is better than sending things to a landfill -- *if* recycling actually happens -- but if you want to be fiscally and ecologically healthy, avoiding the need to dispose of objects is infinitely better than either. 

And here's the latest issue with recycling:  we're starting to face a world in which not only is landfill-bound trash an economic and environmental problem, but so is recycling-bound trash.   In particular,  our main depository for recycling (China) has started refusing to accept our refuse -- see this link, for example.  I've seen this story pop up many times around me in the last few months.  My husband hasn't seen it at all, he tells me.  It's the styrofoam bowl at the rescue mission all over again:  in my face and invisible to others.

Still, I continue to pull a Nancy Reagan, and Just Say No to trash.  Also, to (try to) be gracious and thankful (but firm) when well-intentioned people put trash on my plate.   

Dishing up faith and charity

A few of the plates we've washed yesterday and today.

Washing a giant pile of dishes the other day made me realize how much charity is connected to faith. Not faith like, "only holy people who have faith in X religion can truly be charitable" --- I don't mean that at all.   No, I mean that it struck me, as I was washing a pile of plates that I'd given to my church, that giving away my money (time, energy, whatever) to try to make the world a better place takes a bunch of faith that my gift will actually make a difference.

I'm pretty sure we all wonder about this.  That's part of why sites like Charity Navigator and GiveWell exist; to help people figure out whether, or to what extent, their money might actually feed people, or cure people, or provide education/environmental protections/emotional healing/etc.

Giving locally makes it possible to close the feedback loop a bit more tightly -- that is, to see the actual effect that a donation has.  A few years ago, I donated 100 reusable, washable plates to my church, in hopes that I could reduce the bags and bags of trash that accompanied our occasional communal meals.  Our church doesn't have a dishwasher, so I also offered (and continue to offer) my services in washing those dishes.  But even so, the gift came with a bit of cross-fingers on my part.  Would people be willing to use these plates instead of the more "convenient" disposable paper plates?  Or would they grumble at the hassle of storing these plates, of setting up collection bins after meals, of sorting plates and silverware into one bin, cloth napkins (oh, yeah, I got those for the church, too) in another bin, and landfill-bound trash in another?

Tableware (on the table) waiting to be wrapped in
clean cloth napkins(in the laundry basket on the ground).
Prewash the Dog lurks expectantly in the background.

Well, those plates were successful enough that the church lunches grew in size, and I ended up ordering and donating even more plates.  More napkins.  More tableware.

People at church started telling me that they think about the trash they throw out at home because of me. I'm not sure they're changing anything they do, but at least they're thinking.

Then, when our church ESL classes kicked into high gear, I ordered/donated a bunch of stackable mugs, which these days make an almost-weekly trek between the church and our dishwasher.

People have used my plates for weddings.  For funerals. For general gatherings.  I have to say, I'm so happy.  I'm happy even though I'm surrounded yesterday and today by piles of dirty dishes.   It's just wonderful to know that this action of mine is making a difference outside of my own home.

Many of the cleaned dishes,
just about ready to go back to church.

This year, the ESL team decided to use the plates for their end-of-year party --- a party that in previous years has generated bag-upon-bag of landfill-bound trash.  The challenge is that this was with a group of people who are unfamiliar with a lot of aspects of the environmental movement, and who understandably appreciate the convenience of disposable items.  Why bother to haul plates around, wash, dry, stack, when you could just toss something in a bin and be done?

And there's no denying it's a bunch of work cleaning up for a dinner that serves more than 100 people.  We ended up doing a giant laundry load of napkins, and five dishwasher loads of dishes.

And yet, the work was worth it, as you can see from an email from my Grasshopper at ESL:

 The total trash output of the evening was about one large bag, and it was mostly plastic tablecloths that weren't within our control.  Remembering the absolute mound of trash from last year, I'd say we did well!! 

I even think that folks are coming around to the "fun" of it; several asked how much trash we ended up with since we were all being so very aware of where to place what.  AWESOME!

It's super gratifying to be able to see the effect I'm having by sharing my money (and my trash-averse rants) locally.   I miss having that kind of feedback when I send my money farther afield.

Which is where the faith comes in.  I know that sharing money locally helps people who are -- by global standards -- already pretty darned well off.  So I'm just going to have to extrapolate, cross fingers, that the checks I write for refugees, orphans, plants and animals, and struggling entrepreneurs in other parts of the world will be as effective.    And maybe the trash we didn't send to the landfill this week will slow the degradation of this planet we all share.

Mugging it up for my church

My church does a cool outreach for our community:  an ESL class.  We've been doing this for years, but here the "we" really means "they", because I haven't at all been part of it except for cheering.  (Here's me cheering:  Yay!  Go, church!)

One of the actual volunteers with the ESL classes is a follower of this blog who has started an awesome sustainability Facebook page.  Because of this, she and I got into an extended e-conversation about recycling styrofoam*, and in the course of this conversation, I learned that our ESL program uses styrofoam cups.   This is horror.  This is dreadful.

* The UPS Store near us recycles styrofoam packing peanuts, 

but not other kinds of styrofoam. 

There is a Dart Container company "near" us 

(depending on your definition of "near") 

that recycles other shapes of styrofoam.

At any rate, even if it gets recycled, styrofoam is a horrible burden on our fragile planet.  So I decided to buy reusable cups for my church. My Miser Mom Grasshopper (she of the ESL volunteer/Sustainability page persuasion) has already volunteered to be the one to wash the cups each week, so that helped to make the decision to spring for cups an easy one for me.  (Someone else is washing the dishes!  Fantastic!)    

Another aspect making my decision even easier is that an electronic accounting glitch canceled my August donation to my church, so I felt like I "owed" some money anyway, and why the heck not donate the money in the form of reusable mugs?

At any rate, I did a search at my newly-beloved Restaurant Store, and found some 8 oz melamine mugs that look nice and are semi-stackable.  Here's a photo of some of them after they arrived -- I think they really do look good!

Cost:
I ordered 9 dozen (108 cups) for about $240 (that includes shipping).  How does this compare to the price of the styrofoam cups?  At first glance, bill for the mugs seems like a huge expense:  it's possible to get 1000 styrofoam cups for only about $40.  But if my ESL group uses 100 cups a week (which is about what we do right now), and if they meet about 30 times per year (which is about how often they meet right now), then these cups should recover their cost in only 2 years.  That's not a bad ROI, really.

108 UPC codes on 108 stickers,
now no longer on the cups.

Stickers:
Oooh, I want to share something about removing stickers!   Because in spite of me ordering these babies bulk, EVERY one of these cups came with a UPC sticker attached.  At first, when I started peeling the stickers off, I got a lot of gummy residue and had to spend a bit of time picking and picking to get it off.  But then I remembered that heat helps to loosen glue --- and the microwave is a great tool for adding a bit of heat.  For example, when the charity envelopes that I save for about a year get gummy, 15 seconds in the microwave helps to "steam" them so I can carefully peel them open again.  So I resorted to putting batches of a dozen cups in the microwave for about a minute, and when I took them out, I could peel the stickers off with almost no resistance.  Lovely!


Storage:
Because my church doesn't have a dishwasher, we need a way for my Grasshopper to transport the mugs between the church and her home.  There are probably better long-term solutions than the one I came up with, but I sort of like this as a first-attempt:  a canvas beach bag that I snagged from a "free" pile after my neighborhood's summer yard sale.



Bonus: stackable toys
Each set of a dozen mugs came in a little cardboard box, somewhat larger than the size of a brick.  These boxes make excellent stacking toys, and my granddaughter A-child has delighted in making towers that she can knock down with abandon, endangering no one in the process.  So it turns out that if you buy 108 cups, you get a construction set for free.  Awesome.

Prewash demonstrates her burgeoning "sit. stay." skills
next to the tower of stackable cardboard boxes. 

dOnnOr 2017: food, funds, family, friends

Well, our dOnnOr last night was lOads of fun!

The dinner was traditional:  bOgOls, hOmbOrgOrs, Opples, and OniOn rOngs.  YOm!

Notice the money tablecloth under the plate?
I designed it for our tax-day dinner, but it's good to have another a use for this!

New this year to the menu: for dessert we had dOnOts, a rare treat indeed in his household!

We looked over an amazing picture book called "The Material World: A Global Family Portrait". Peter Menzel photographed families all over the world with their possessions. It's a beautiful and humbling book.   You can also see many of the photos at this web site, but the descriptions and stories that go with the photos make it worth borrowing the book from the library.

We had a robust crowd, with four of my kids -- including J-son, who brought a bike tire that needs repairing and that fortuitously provided additional O-shaped decOration for the dOnnOr!

We also had a good buddy of mine who works with non-profits, who told us about her experience raising money for charities.  She brought up some good points about donating to local versions of national charities (for example, "Small City Habitat for Humanity" as contrasted with "Habitat for Humanity").   She also was very much more in the know than we were about implications for charities that have -- or have not -- pulled their events from Mar-A-Lago.

My good buddy, my grandchild A, and J-son.

And why were my friend's observations so helpful to us?  Because money for charities was of course the other activity (entertainment?) for the dOnnOr.   The kids each got to pick envelopes from among the charities we support, and write the checks.

Choosing envelopes.  K-daughter (in the middle) gets the most excited about this.

This dinner is a great way to remind my kids how to write checks (which in our electronic age, is becoming a bit of a dying art), in addition of course to reminding the offspring that it's fun to practice generosity.

N-son's favorite charities were all scooped up by K-daughter,
but he still got to write checks to the NAACP and a local community action group.

I sign the checks, of course, and then enter them into the check register.  And that's the biggest clean-up aspect of this annual event.

I love that the dOnnOr has evolved over the years into a way to get everyone in the family involved in our charitable plans, and I especially love that for me (selfishly), this makes the act of giving an even more joyous one.

The 2017 Donor Dinner (aka, the "Donnor")

One of the golden rules of frugality is to use your money where it makes the most difference to you and yours.   For example, a box of store-bought cereal costs about a gazillion times what it costs to make my own granola, and it doesn't much alter my breakfast happiness quotient.  So I don't buy prepackaged cereals.   For another example, Giardia meds for my dog cost about a gazillion times what a box of store-bought cereal does, but having a diarrhea-free dog is sort-of a big deal to me and my kids, so this summer we forked over the money for Metronidazole and Panacur without complaint.  We spend our money only where it brings the most contentment or where it alleviates the most pain.  That's the frugal mantra.

Ergo (that's math-speak for "therefore"), it makes sense to practice giving our money away to other people.

The reason that it's frugal to give our money away is that there are other people in the world who can make much better use of it, at least in support of creating the world our family cares about.  I basically stink at feeding hungry children on the opposite side of the globe or even in my own community, but there are charitable organizations I give money to that have helped to raise entire families out of poverty by feeding and educating their children.   Likewise,  I am a total incompetent at curing even the most curable of common third-world diseases, so I'm grateful for organizations like Doctors without Borders who bravely go where I myself fear to tread.

My family gives our money away in a bunch of different modes.  Monthly, we have money taken out of my paycheck (United Way), my checking account (church), and my credit card (World Vision and my alma mater).  Annually, we've started transferring large amounts of money to a Donor Advised Fund, from which we'll eventually direct it to charities when we retire and when we've had even more practice at spending our charitable money wisely.  (Because figuring out how to give well does take practice, same as learning many other frugal skills like how to make a yummy no-sugar granola.)

At any rate, here's one thing I've practiced and I'm getting moderately good at.  All year long, I save the solicitation envelopes we get.  There are a heck of a lot of these solicitations.

Once a year, usually in the summer, I sort through the envelopes (below you see me sitting cross-legged in my 25¢ yard-sale purchased gold skirt, putting the envelopes into piles alphabetically around me).

I cull the duplicates.  I've started adding handwritten notes to the worst repeat-offenders, asking them to mail me one solicitation in June or July, and quit with the monthly harangues.  That actually seemed to help a lot. 

This year, my husband and I have refocused our areas where we want to donate money.  We've always tried to channel a bunch of it toward feeding hungry people; this year we're paying special attention to the global refugee crisis, affecting over one hundred million people this year.   Having a population larger than the size of Russia facing food, water, and health care shortages doesn't get as much media attention as does, say, one particular relative of Trump meeting with a few people from Russia, but the worldwide refugee epidemic is real and it's just going to get worse --- my husband and I want to contribute in our own small way to helping the NGO's that are on the front lines.

But speaking of media coverage, a new area for us this year is to support investigative news outlets.  For reasons that I don't need to elaborate on, we feel that these places need grass-roots support more than they have in the past. So there's a new pile of envelopes for us.

And growing in emphasis for us this year is caring for the environment.  We've long donated to local conservancy groups, but this year we've added the Environmental Defense Fund, in part because this group seems to have managed to partner with industry in ways that seem to mark it as pragmatic (in addition to being idealistic), which matters a lot to me.

And in the same way that Erika over at NW Edible has decided to start celebrating fall harvests (because that time of year means a lot to her and her family), our family has for several years celebrated the signing of the charity checks.  Our annual dOnnOr is tonight.  (Here's a post on a previous dOnnOr).

Perhaps I'll have pictures tomorrow.

What it's like to work in a soup kitchen

What surprised me most the first time I volunteered to serve breakfast at our homeless shelter, a year and a half ago, was the children:  Girls with their hair done in braids and barrettes, wearing sparkle backpacks, school uniforms neatly arranged.  Toddlers in pajamas. Wide-eyed babies in strollers.  I really was expecting the wild-eyed smelly bearded guys, not the adorable little kids headed for another day in second grade.

The first time few times I volunteered to serve breakfast at our local homeless shelter, I was wondering, "What do I say?  How do I make these people comfortable with going through a soup kitchen line?"  The more I returned, the more I realized that almost all of the guests at the soup kitchen know the routine, and they felt more comfortable there than I did (usually as in "stable", and rarely as in "entitled").

Over time, I've built relationships and sometimes even friendships with the people who come in.  Not the "I need a few bucks" kind of a relationship I thought I'd have to be careful about -- not one person has ever hinted at money to me -- but a face-lights-up, "oh!  Glad to see you", kind of relationship.  I've tutored one guy in math, traded bike stories with another, read Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the bus to a bunch of kids.

And after getting used to the stability of it all, it's disconcerting to have people just disappear.   A guy named Teddy and I developed a routine of talking about bikes and about strategies for cold-weather biking.  One day he asked me to "Pray for me; I've got a job interview today.  I hope it goes well."  And then I never saw him again.  Moving out of the shelter and back into "mainstream" life is the point, of course, but it's disconcerting just to have someone I like vanish into thin air.

In the material sense, I've come to learn some neat stuff about what goes on in large kitchens. I love the giant dishwashers, the ladles and stainless steel trays, the machine that washes and peels potatoes (super cool!), the ease with which things get labeled and sorted and stowed away in plain sight.  Cleaning the kitchen there after serving breakfast to 100 people is faster and more intuitive than cleaning the kitchen in my own home.

Kind of ironically, serving people food that has been donated to the shelter is now my most significant regular contact with trash and waste.  We use washable plates and glasses, but disposable (plastic) tableware and disposable (styrofoam) bowls and disposable (paper) napkins.  Also disposable hair nets and gloves (although washable aprons).   We fill several large trashcans each day with uneaten food, with packaging, and with disposable products.  Sigh.

And of course, for N-son, volunteering at the soup kitchen over the summer has been transformative.  He's decided (as only a teenager can decide) that he wants to go into the culinary arts, so much so that he now spends half a day at a culinary training center as part of his high school curriculum.  But he learned so much more: he learned about overcoming obstacles, about persistence, and about how all that can lead to compassion.  As I wrote in September,

[N-son] came home  talking about making mac-n-cheese from scratch, learning to cut fruit quickly, the importance of no-skid shoes, the proper technique for mopping (or "moping", as he spelled it). He interviewed the cooks about what it had been like to be homeless, and he heard story after story of wanting to make amends, to give back, to make the most of their second chances.

I go there once a week now, and it's a part of my routine that I look forward to each week.  And N-son goes back whenever he gets a day off of school.  Next semester, my teaching schedule will mean I can't serve breakfast there, and I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out whether I can fit a lunch-time volunteering routine into my academic schedule.  We'll see!

On the road again (and in the air again)

This has been a big travel week for yours truly.  I'm writing this post in what is the wee hours of a Long Beach, California morning -- although the hours don't feel all that "wee" to me, since 5:30 a.m. local time is 8:30 a.m. back at home.

I'm going to back up and do a small bit of bragging.  This travel is all funded by some professional development money that landed in my lap because, last May, I won a fancy award for teaching at my college.  The award is semi-ironic because, of course, last year I was on sabbatical and wasn't teaching at all.  So either I won this award now because my school figures, "She's a great teacher when she's away from her students; once she gets back in the classroom, it's all downhill from here, so we'd better give her the award now before she spoils it."  Or it's because they figured, "She's so freakin' good, that even when she's not in the classroom she's a better prof than all the others."

Me, getting a teaching award, trying to look all humble and that.

At any rate, whatever the reason, I got to stand up on stage at Commencement and make the already-long event last even longer, keeping students from their degrees while they listened to yet another boring citation.

With this award come a sizable chunk of money that I could use either personally or professionally.  I decided not to plunk the money straight into my own bank account, because what I really want to do is travel around to do some math, and so I put the money into a "professional development" fund where then money doesn't get taxed (meaning, more money for travel).

And this past week, I've been spending that money.  A 3-day trip to North Carolina used up about $250 of the moolah; it also gave me a chance to chat with some mathematicians who I met last summer, and whom I might want to work with again in the future.  It was a seriously great trip.

In the Miser Mom way, I tried to keep expenses low.  The university I was visiting paid for my hotel and meals, and I used my travel money to spring for a rental car and gas.   The more I do rental cars for long trips, the more I love the idea of not owning cars and just "borrowing" them from the cosmic car library when I need them.  Cars have gotten so much nicer since 2001 when my old (dented up) Prius was made, and my Prius is a pretty nice car!  Intermittent luxury is sort of fun.

This trip to California is even more of a treat, if that's possible.  I'm at a conference hosted by SACNAS (Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in the Sciences), so it's not as much about my research as my NC trip was.  But because I have this big fat pillow of money buried in my professional development mattress, I could afford to bring other people along.  I'm paying the way not just for myself, but also for an undergraduate math major and for a visiting professor (that is, a prof who just got his PhD two years ago, and who has a 3-year position, not a tenure-track position,  at my college).  So there are three of us who made the 14-hour trip from Pennsylvania to California yesterday.

And again, frugalizing.  I couldn't trim the hefty registration fees, and airfare+shuttles for three people is some serious dough, no matter how careful we are.  But I found a cozy AirBnB three blocks from the convention center that cut the lodging costs in half, compared to nearby hotels.  We all packed super light, minimizing luggage fees, and I have been doling out the trail mix that successfully tided us over through crowded airports and traffic-jam-laden shuttle rides.  (LA traffic-- Sheesh!).

Sort of ironically, this money that I got for teaching (or for not teaching, since I got it at the end of my sabbatical) is taking me away from my students yet again.  I've co-opted some of my colleagues into giving my students an exam while I'm away from them, and my travel schedule means that I won't get to grade and return their exams to them for a while -- I'm neglecting my students temporarily.  But I'm so glad I'm here (my first ever SACNAS conference! woo-hoo!) and I'm so glad I got to bring some people with me who wouldn't have gotten the chance to come on their own.   Huzzah for frugal communal traveling! 

Where is X-son?

Back in December 2011, my husband and I visited Haiti to meet, among the many people there, one young boy.  A friend had met him on a missions trip and fallen in love with him; she thought he might be a great fit for our family; and so we took the trip ourselves to see if we agreed.

This kid (whom we call "X-son" in this blog) was . . . well, charming.  He had a presence.  He was a leader among the kids in his orphanage; he was respectful; he cuddled up to us.  We, too, fell in love and started a long, convoluted adoption process that eventually went nowhere.  (A fuller explanation of what happened to the failed adoption is in this old post).  

Since then, what's happened?  Well, we "supported him" at school in Haiti.  It's hard to feel like that's really support, because a whopping $300 paid for all of his schooling and uniforms and transportation for the year -- but even though it doesn't seem like enough, we sent our $300 and occasional notes down to Haiti along with another missionary friend.

The updates were sometimes sweet, but a lot of the times, they were hard to hear.  A year ago the missionary wrote,

He is doing well. He goes to Mario's school. It is a Haitian school. A poor school. I cannot promise the quality of education but he is happy. He lives with his mom. Life is hard. There is no running water or electric in their area. All water must be carried a long distance. There supposedly is a truck that brings water but if you do not have money to pay, you do not get water.

When we asked about helping pay for water, the missionary cautioned us:  

The one thing I think I would be careful of would be to create a dependency for him and his family. Giving is really tricky. Let me talk with my Haitian advisor on that one. See what we can do.I so not think it will tempt him into trouble, it would create him to ask you for everything. 

 We ended up not sending down money for water.  Contact got increasingly infrequent. I suppose that's to be expected from both ends. X-son at one point asked for money for a computer; instead we arranged for him to share a computer with the son of a local Haitian minister.  And that was the last we heard for a while, except for brief "thinking of you" posts on Facebook.

So when my missionary friend was heading down to Haiti again, I asked her to look up X-son.  Does he need money for school this year?  What's he up to?

She wrote:

I have not seen [X-son] for over a year. Last time I saw him was right before the start of the 2015-2016 school year. I was under the impression that was his last year of school. I do see one of his friends, and he told me that [X-son] was making poor choices. Other than that, I do not have any other information regarding him. I am leaving for Haiti tomorrow and will inquire about him and see what I can find out for you.

He called me a few months ago talking real ghetto-like. Calling me “baby”. He wanted money. It was not the same boy I knew in the past. It really makes me sad for him.

And then, after her trip down, she wrote 

I just got back from Haiti on Saturday and was in Montrouis. I asked several people about [X-son]. No one had information on him. I am under the impression he is making poor decisions in his life. He broke contact with his prior friends that I know and am sorry to say they do not know where he is. I am sorry.

So, we've lost him.  In multiple senses of that word.

Part of me thinks, if we'd managed to get him out of Haiti right when we'd met him, we could have made a real difference.  He was still young enough that we could have taught him English, given him reasonable hope for a decent future, yadda yadda.

Part of me thinks, this is just one kid.  There are so many kids in Haiti in the same situation as X-son: scrambling to find some way to survive in a country that's torn by corruption, deficient in basic needs like food, water, shelter, trash removal -- as well as in bigger social needs, like a functioning government and a stable community infrastructure.

Part of me thinks, Haiti is such a miserable place.  If I were X-son -- buffeted by poverty, typhoid, and natural disasters, steeped in a misogynist, corrupt culture where the people who figure out how to game the system are the ones who survive and thrive -- well, who's to say I wouldn't make similar choices?  Get in with the powerful people. Take what I need.  Stop being a "victim", and get myself up on top.

What X-son has done for me is to make all these abstract, foreign issues personal.  It's not just hungry children somewhere far away; it's my hungry X-son.  It's not just corruption and questions of the best kind of international aid; it's my X-son getting typhoid, running away from the orphanage that beats him, making "poor choices" that might enable him to survive.  

I'm very sorry to have lost him.

The Seven Essays of a Highly Inefficient Procrastinator

It's September, and school has started up again.  My boys have left the Quaker Local School behind them and returned to public school for their last two years of secondary education.

And here's a story about that transition.

Where J-son has been our child of many spectacular stories because of his impulse control issues, N-son tends to err more on the side of procrastination.  J-son has excelled in sins of commission (if you will), while N-son has taken on the sins of omission.  So we sort of have to watch him and nag him about getting out there, doing things, instead of just sitting around at home playing on his phone.

Last spring, we got an email near the end of the school year from N-son's Bible teacher. Each of the kids in the class was supposed to do a project:  J-son chose to attempt 2-day fast (he lasted 15 hours, but he tried).  N-son, the teacher told us, had promised he would volunteer at the soup kitchen in the homeless shelter that I volunteer at.

Did I mention that this was near the end of the school year?  In fact, there were exactly four school days left at that point, and we hadn't heard a peep out of N-son about any volunteer project.  We quickly got him signed up for a 2-hour volunteer shift on Tuesday afternoon, right after school. He and I biked there together and did the shift together, with me taking on the new-to-me role of washing dishes, and with N-son helping to bus tables and hand out doughnuts.

When we got home, I asked him, "Do you need to write some kind of essay about this?"  After all, I'm a teacher; I know that doing isn't enough for learning; reflection is part of the process, too.  N-son admitted that yes, he was supposed to write an essay and that he'd do it and turn it in the next day.

So Wednesday after school, I double-checked:  Did you write the essay?  Did you turn it in?  Yes and yes, he assured me.

But my husband was dubious.  So Thursday he asked N-son yet again:  Did you do the essay?  Did you give it to your teacher?  Did you actually put the essay into his hands?  N-son repeatedly assured us the essay had been done, adding details:  he did it with Ms. C, his learning support teacher.  He gave it to Mr. S, his bible teacher, in person.

And then Friday, we got another note from Mr. S:  N-son hasn't turned in his volunteer essay.  What should I do?   We called Ms. C, who told us, We asked N-son about the essay, and he said he did it at home.

We told Mr. S he should just fail the kid.  Not only didn't he do the work, but he repeatedly, deliberately lied about it.  We also told N-son that this was the end of the Quaker Local School -- we had made it clear that we were working hard to pay for them to go there, but we weren't willing to do that if they weren't going to work hard also.  So the school was over.

But that's not the end of the story.  Mr. S told us he'd like to give N-son one more chance to do the project late, albeit for reduced credit.  He gave us the complete assignment: it turns out, N-son was supposed to do four hours of service, and to interview at least one person, and to relate the service to specific bible topics.

At this point, because N-son's work-avoidance had created so much more work for all the adults around him, I decided it ought to create more work for him, too.  So I told him that not only was he going to write this essay for Mr. S, but he was going to write essays seven times this summer, one for each time he'd lied to us or his teachers.  You said you did the work, so you'll actually do it.

N-son passed the class with a D-, which was super-generous on the part of Mr. S.   (Or was it?  Mr. S had at one point confided to my husband, "I really like N-son, but I really don't want him in my class again next year.")

But even more, N-son started volunteering regularly -- about 20 hours a week -- at the soup kitchen.  One of the cooks -- a big dude named Calvin with skin darker than N-son's and a lot of experience with wayward youth -- took N-son under his wing.  And N-son, in return, glommed onto Calvin.  He came home talking about making mac-n-cheese from scratch, learning to cut fruit quickly, the importance of no-skid shoes, the proper technique for mopping (or "moping", as he spelled it).  He interviewed the cooks about what it had been like to be homeless, and he heard story after story of wanting to make amends, to give back, to make the most of their second chances.

When it was time to start signing up for classes at the public school, N-son had to make choices about which "Small Learning Communities" to join, and he asked for the "Public Service" community.  When the school talked about sending kids out on internships in the future, N-son put himself on the waiting list for "Culinary Arts".  And he promised Calvin and the other cooks that, even though his essays are done (so he doesn't have to volunteer anymore), and even though school has started (so he has much less available time), he still plans to go back on weekends to chop food, wash dishes, and mope the floors.

I collected up all the essays and made two additional copies.  One copy, I gave to the soup kitchen for their records; the staff there seemed to love seeing themselves through this young kid's eyes.  The other copy, I attached to a cover note that had a large helping of thank yous, along with a "we never know what effect we'll have on our students" message, and sent it off to Mr. S.   He's beginning another round of his own school year, with another set of students who will take on projects in his class.  I wish them all -- and all the students and teachers who are starting this new year -- the very best.  And if these students or their teachers get second chances, I hope they learn to make the most of that spectacular, wonderful gift.

dOnnOr 2016; be Advised

A few months ago, I was searching for a good digital picture of my dad, and I decided to google him.  To my surprise, one of the top hits I got was a story about how he and my mom had donated $300,000 to their alma mater.  I had known that my parents had been generous with their school, but I hadn't known the specifics until then.  (The way my dad explained it to his kids is, "We're giving away your inheritance.")  And I was super proud -- the first google hit I got for my dad wasn't about his career in physics (which is prodigious--Science Citation Index credits him with more than 150 articles); it's about this act of giving.  That's impressive.

(Okay, I know it also says something about the PR machine of the school my parents gave the money to versus the PR tinker-toy of particle physics, but I'm still impressed).

And so we have dinner.  Or more specifically, dOnnOr, originally named after one of my kids' favorite snacks, the Opple.  You make an Opple by starting with an apple, and coring it . . .

and then slicing it thinly.   Voila!  Opples!

And this entire bowl of Opples disappeared at dinner, compared to a few little bags of potato pOtOtO chips that I had brought home from some event where there were more people than food.  (Note to self: only 40% of the people at my table ate any of the chips.)

But I digress:  the annual dOnnOr is a time for us to eat food shaped in Os (like Opples, and  hOmbOrgOrs on bOgles), and it's also a time I get to think about charitable giving.  You are what you eat:  if you eat dOnnOr, then you turn into a donor. (?!)

This past week, I *finally* did something I've been thinking about/working toward for a long time: I opened a Donor Advised Fund with Vanguard Charitable.  This money is now something I can direct to specific charities, at whatever time in the future I deem fit.  Pulling together the money to set this up took a long time because the initial investment is so big . . . but you eat an Opple one bite at a time, and I saved up for this fund a bit at a time, and so eventually I got here.

The Donor Advised Fund really becomes a mini charitable funding entity.  Mine is called by my last name and my husband's last name:  as in, "the Miser-Nonmiser Fund".  I think of it as part of my "Retirement Charity Savings".  I have a regular retirement savings through my 403b (like a 401K, but for academics); I have an HRSA (Health Retirement Savings Account) that's just for retirement medical expenses; and now I have my Donor Advised Fund.  Between now and when I retire, the fund monies will be invested (through Vanguard Charitable) in the stock market, so they can grow along with my retirement portfolio, and then later when I'm ready, I can start giving that money away.

The practical advantages are that this allows me to save more money for retirement in a tax advantaged way.   Since I'm going to give money to charity after I retire, this fund allows me to get the tax break now (I'm already maxing out my 403b).  But the emotional break is even bigger than the tax break for me:  I don't have to feel like I'm making a choice between being generous and hoarding money for my future self:  from now on, this is a way I can do both at once.

When people ask me for money, I . . .

I spend a lot of my financial thinking time thinking about getting a good portion of my family's money out of our hands and into the hands of others who can use it.  I've written in a bunch of different places about donating money, belongings, and time (sometimes, even body parts) to charitable organizations.

It's not surprising, therefore, that we get a lot of requests from charitable organizations.  Actually, what does surprise me is how seldom I get requests for money from people I know.  I've been serving breakfast at a nearby homeless shelter one morning a week for about a year now.  Not one person has hinted at money -- I've loaned one person a book; I loaned one volunteer a cloth bag (to bring home spare bagels); and another guy (who got out and moved away) calls me once a week just to chat about life.  But not one money request.

Funny side story:  A friend of mine from work, whose son goes to the same Quaker Local School that my sons went to, asked my husband if I was going to go to the school's benefit auction.  "C'mon, she's gotta go," my work-friend urged him.  "These Quakers are frugal; they're her kind of people!".   My husband laughed his head off:  "These Quakers drive their kids to school in SUVs, and their kids all have the latest iPhones! They're not Miser Mom's people!"  And no, I didn't go to the auction to buy artwork (etc) I don't need, but mostly because I hate buying stuff.  So, apparently, auctions are the wrong way to ask me to help with a charity!

Occasionally I get funding pleas from distant family members or former students of mine who are taking on an activity for charity.  My ex-aunt-in-law, who is a wonderful person, did a cross-country ski thing to raise money for cancer research; an alum of mine grew his mustache in Movember for a similar cause.  In general, if I think the cause is one that I don't find objectionable, I'll go ahead and donate $25-$50 to the charity they're promoting.  I like hearing from my distant aunts and from my former students, and if this is what it takes . . . well, I know the College I work at asks them for money, so I don't mind setting a good example while simultaneously bribing them to write to me.

But of course sometimes I get hard-luck stories from people I know, and a couple of times a year we'll get requests from kids from church who are trying to raise money to go on missions trips. I've been reading blog posts lately regarding some new (to me) phenomenon called "GoFundMe", and good timing, because earlier this summer I just got my first GFM request.

Hard-luck stories: it took me a while to come up with a good response to them.  For example, I knew a woman who I'll call "Beverly".  She'd been in and out depression (even going to a hospital for a while).  She stayed at our home for a week or so after one hospital visit, not because she was homeless but just because she didn't want to be alone.  She got so far behind in her various payments that she was afraid to open her mail or answer her phone, because it was always creditors or other bad news.  But she (mostly) had the money to pay for her debts (mostly, not entirely).

When Beverly moved back into her apartment, rather than give her money to pay her bills, I went two or three times to just sit with her while she sorted mail.  I'd open the envelopes and put things into piles.   She paid bills online, if she could, or create an IOU pile if she couldn't.  I was just the calm, non-anxious presence, and she really needed that.

That was years ago.  I most recently saw Beverly at the homeless shelter where I serve breakfast.  She'd lost her apartment and was now living at the shelter.  She eventually had to leave the shelter, too -- I don't know where she is now.  I don't know how much my sitting with her all those years ago helped (if it helped at all), but I know that money wouldn't have made a difference.

So.  I got my first GoFundMe request, this one from a former student, a student whom I will call "Pat".  Pat and Pat's twin sibling (raised by a single parent) have a pile o' student debt.  Pat is interested, long-term, into going into grad school, but in the meanwhile, wants to go work overseas at an "underfunded school" in a region of the world that is very much related to Pat's intended grad work.  There's very little money to go around in the family; does anyone want to help?

I've never asked my former professors (and other internet-connected people) for money; but I have gotten travel grants that helped me early on in my career.  And I had parents who put me through college without any debt.  So I don't at all sneer at Pat for asking for money or think that I'm better because I wouldn't do the same myself.  On the other hand, since I'm not going to open my wallet, how can I support this young scholar?

For what it's worth, here's what I wrote, deciding to share advising and philosophy as opposed to sharing cash:

What a wonderful adventure lies ahead of you!  You have a good heart, and I think you're right that this could be terrific for you, both in terms of your professional but also in terms of expanding your own views.

So, the bad news is that my husband and I have a policy of not giving money to people going on trips.  (For example, we sponsor children in other countries, but we don't pay for people who go on missions trips to those countries).  

On the other hand, I'd love to help you achieve all these goals.  It turns out, I'm particularly good at figuring out how to do big things on a little bit of money.  When my husband and I got married, I "inherited" his huge financial obligations.  Somehow in spite of all this, we got things under control and managed to get to the point where we could pay off our home early, adopt a bunch of kids, get multiple kids through college with little-to-no debt, and set my husband up for early retirement.

SO . . . if you'd like some advice on how to frugalize your life, advice that might make the upcoming trip less expensive but that might also help you financially through the rest of your life, I'd be happy to offer that.  Ooh, and books.

Are you likely to be in [our town] any time between now and [the day of your trip]?  If so, I'd love to have you come over for lunch or dinner. 

If Pat hadn't written back, I would have been okay with leaving the conversation there.  But Pat did write back, with this message:

Hi Professor!!
Thank you for your kind words. They are very encouraging, as you always are.
All that you are offering sounds great! I would love advice and books and a meal. I'll let you know when I'll be in town, because I definitely will be.

And that's how Pat and I got together earlier this week. We would have had quiche, except that Miser Dog ate it first, while we were touring the garden (dang that sneaky Miser Dog!)  So we had homemade bread with store-bought peanut butter, plus homemade salsa and peaches from our tree.  I got to hear updates on Pat's very interesting life, and I got to load this former student of mine down with a few more books (the Tightwad Gazette and Your Money or Your Life).

What people ask for, it's not always what they actually need.  I'm so glad, though, that people ask.  Because the request gives me a chance to connect and reconnect with people, to share a bit of my own life and my own interests, but also to hear more about theirs.

But Miser Dog, man, he's got some 'splaining to do about that quiche.

Where the money goes

Now that we're getting more money than I had budgeted for, where will it go?

Well, like any good consumers, we've bought ourselves a fancy new vehicle!  In fact, our new purchase cost us three times the value of our current lovely car.  Ooh, we are riding pretty!

Heh-heh.  The new vehicle is indeed fancy, but it's a bike.  And our car is a 2001 Prius with an ugly crunchy dent on the driver's side, so its Blue Book value is fairly pitifully low.  So, while this bike is still expensive by normal standards (it costs four times as much as my SPDM did, and I think I bought a super-expensive bike myself), the cost was still just a tad under $6K.

My husband's fancy new vehicle.

The blue book value of our car.  

When the SPDM got a flat,
we could switch wheels between our bikes
while we got my tire replaced. 

The reason for getting this bike is that my husband's other racing bikes are 15-20 years old.  And while they're still perfectly good bikes from a commuter/weekend rider point of view, they are getting too old for the racing circuit.  For example, a cyclist who has a flat often just trades wheels with the race support crew, but modern racing wheels don't fit on my husband's old bikes (just like newer Microsoft Word documents can't be read by old Microsoft software.  bleah.)

Is this a "frugal" purchase?  In some sense, of course, no:  nearly 6000 times no, you might say.   On the other hand, my husband regularly rides with people who spent $10K or more for their bikes, so in comparison to theirs, his is super cheap (!).   And the bike is hardly an impulse purchase:  he spends 2-3 hours a day riding.  We're really spending this money on something that is central to how he spends his time and how he creates his identity.  It's meaningful to us, even if it is a luxury item.

Okay, but it's not like we're about to shower ourselves in material goods.  We haven't felt particularly deprived this past year, so it's not like we think our lives will be better if we start spending large parts of our days in stores.  In fact, this past year of wide-open schedules has been so nice, that it makes even more sense to put our money aside to make wide-open schedules a permanent thing in a few more years.

In fact, we're highly influenced by the Your Money or Your Life argument that increasing spending on ourselves brings diminishing--and even possibly negative--returns on happiness.  We just spent a pile of money on a bike that takes us past comfort to luxury.  If we start buying more for ourselves, the result will be clutter.  At this point, the best way to use the money to make ourselves happier is by diverting it into places where there are true needs.

What happens if we spend more money on things
is that we have to clean and take care of those things.

If we share with other people,
the joy just bounces back on us.
Yee-hah!

So here's the priority for the extra incoming money.

1. Bump up the charitable giving to pre-sabbatical levels (or maybe even higher).
2. Max out my retirement accounts.
3. Set aside money for home repair projects (there are a bathroom and the kitchen that work fine, but should probably be spiffed up before we sell, five or so years from now).
4. If there's enough extra left over, establish a Donor Advised Fund.

(A couple of people have suggested adding money to college funds.  Fortunately, those are already fully stocked (in fact, probably a little over-stocked, because my sons are likely to go to a nearby, inexpensive Tech school rather than a pricey four-year college).  And we've already started a 529 plan for my grandchild.  If we didn't have future educational expenses already taken care of, these would be fairly high up on that list.)

Holding Fast

This is a story of how my son's Bible class wrecked my marriage (except that it didn't really . . . read on).

At my son's Quaker Local School, one of the required classes is on religion and the Bible.  I've been impressed my how much these classes have delved into non-Quaker religions.   (Okay, the school isn't actually technically "Quaker" -- that's a pseudonym I gave the place.  But it is a school that is run by a religious denomination that promotes pacifism, service to those who have less, and a commitment to respecting the diversity of the world's people.  So, sort of like a Quaker, but not actually).  At any rate, the boys have come home with study sheets on lots of different world religions, including but not only "quakerism".

This semester, the students in J-son's class were each encouraged to take on a large, experiential project.  From the list of many choices, J-son chose to undertake a two-day fast.  He and his dad talked about it all semester long.  His dad (my husband) has done fasts in the past with his men's group, and my guy offered to join in, to support J-son.

And so it was that last Saturday night, about a week ago, the men-folk in my home chowed down in a serious way, preparing themselves for a Sunday and Monday with no food.

I've done two, maybe three, 24-hour fasts in my life, long ago.  I don't remember much about those, except that I learned to carry over the idea of dealing with being hungry to non-fasting days.  About a month after one of my earlier fasts, I happened to be at a math conference where the organizers had just sort of . . . forgotten . . . that all the dining halls would be closed during the first morning.  Almost all of the mathematicians there were as irritable and angry as could be:  "how could they not feed us!!!"  And while I could totally understand how miserable they felt, I was surprised that I could feel hunger but not be miserable about it.  It was a rather happy and encouraging revelation.

So, Sunday morning, I decided, "What the heck?  I'll join the fast."

Not surprisingly, J-son was a wreck.  This kid -- who almost never eats breakfast, even when I beg him to -- woke up declaring he was ravenous.  We went to church, and came home, and he let us all know just how much all he wanted to do was eat.  Instead, we read books and then he called a friend, and went to that friend's home for distraction.  It turns out J-son's 48-hour fast ended up lasting 15 hours, the first 8 of which he was asleep. So.  So there was a lesson learned; perhaps not the same one the teacher intended, but nonetheless new knowledge about hunger and food and limits of endurance.

For my husband, the agony lasted longer; and "agony" was, to his surprise, the right word for the fast this time around.  My guy learned late about the early end to J-son's fast, and the moment he heard, he headed for the kitchen himself.   Twenty hours without food is not easy.

I say that, and I think about people --- some of whom I know --- who go hungry regularly for reasons that have nothing to do with choice.  There are school children in my city who dread the holidays because it means that school lunches stop for a week or more.  There are students at my college who feel guilty about having three meals a day, knowing their families back home can't do the same.  A child we had tried to adopt, X-son down in Haiti, survived the 2010 earthquake in a bizarre twist of fate when his school principal declared there was only enough food in the building for small children.  The principal shooed away the older kids to scavenge, and X-son was sad and dismayed, because he was so hungry and wished he'd been allowed to stay and eat.  That day at lunch, the earthquake killed everyone left in his school.  X-son fled into the hills and has since survived typhoid, beatings, and much more hunger.  Fasting seems like a personal torture, and yet I also worry that it is somehow demeaning, like I'm playing at a game that is all too real for far too many people.

But anyway -- or maybe, "so, therefore" -- I continued.  I decided not to go for a full 48 hours, mostly because I had a mind-numbing, soul-sucking committee call scheduled for noon on Monday, and I figured having a brain would be more important than proving I was a 48-hour brand of toughness.  I went to sleep Sunday night with weird dreams of nestled spoons and nesting children running through my brain.  I woke Monday morning and did my usual morning run with my friend June.  I decided I didn't have enough brain left for a blog post, but I did email and even do a little math.  And then at 9 a.m., I ate breakfast.

The rest of the day Monday, not surprisingly, I ate more and caught up on work and I also slept a lot.

And then Tuesday I divorced my husband because he left me with the dishes.

Okay, actually, I didn't really divorce him, but I wanted to.  In fact, here's the email that I wrote him that afternoon:

[Something about taking N-son to speech therapy] 

Also, I washed the rice pot, and J-son's brownie pan, and filled up the dishwasher, and cleaned the mess off the stove. 

My head is really not in a good space today, so I'm not going to say any more.

Which, if you read between the lines (and my husband did read between the lines) said, "She's furious!".   Now that I look back at this, I think it's pretty amazing that he can understand me so well, which is part of saying that we truly do have an awesome marriage.  And of course, while waking up to a pile of dirty dishes is no fun, I was totally out of my skull to react so severely that I was thinking that the kitchen was a reason that I ought to leave home.  At least I had the brains to shut up and not go publicly berserk, and give myself time to get my head all better again.

And by Wednesday and Thursday, I was back to normal, but also watching my head carefully just to see if other crazy stuff had lodged there during my 36-hour vacation from food.  I think I'm okay again now.

So I learned something about hunger and food and limits of endurance, too.   Good.

What I did with the clothes you donated

This past week, we've taken a break from home-bound chores and schoolwork.  J-son has spent the week with his former foster mom; N-son and I have been volunteering with his church youth group at a giant place called GAiN.   GAiN is a relief organization with a giant warehouse about 8 miles from our home.  What goes on at this warehouse? People pack up food, prepare seed packs, sew things, and pack clothes and blankets.

The sewing was sort of fascinating to me.  Here's one group of sewers making reusable menstrual pads.  This kind of activity is so right up my alley.  We got to hear all sorts of warm-hearted testimonials about how giving these to girls allows them to remain in school, how women who got these danced and clapped because they wouldn't have to sit all by themselves on a pail one week each month.  Good stuff.

There were other large groups of people sewing quilts to send to refugees, both for refugees in camps and for those resettled.

Okay, but that's not what *I* was doing.  I was working on sorting donated clothes to send overseas.  This was personally incredibly fascinating to me. I'd heard about how many, many clothes Americans discard, but I hadn't gotten to see redistribution myself.   If you're curious, too, here's what I got to see.

When we say "lots of clothes" . . . well, this is what "lots" looks like in the warehouse. There are rows and rows of these "Gaylord boxes" -- triple thick corrugated cardboard boxes, about four feet tall.  Each one is full of unsorted clothes or blankets.  

To sort the clothes and get them ready for packing, a forklift would bring four or five of these over to the prep area. How do you get the clothes out of these giant boxes?   You throw several small and enthusiastic children into the Gaylords!

The view of kids in Gaylords from my Quality Control table.
Those baskets of clothes are getting ready to come to me for the first sort.

These kids were totally aDORable, and they had a fantastic time. For them, it was sort of like being in a ball pit or a trampoline park, because they took off their shoes and went playing in these boxes. In addition to throwing piles of clothes into laundry baskets for easy carrying, the kids did a lot of treasure hunting. "Look what I found!" They had infectious energy. (And when their energy flagged, we'd pull them out, send them to work somewhere else, and toss a new kid into the Gaylord).

From there, the baskets of clothes went down a series of tables:  quality control, sorting, pre-folding, and packing.  In the photo below, you can see the unsorted clothes in the Gaylords on the right.  The Gaylords on the left are "special cases" of clothing, and the tables where we sorted and prepare clothes are in the middle, hard to see because they're covered with clothes, too.

My job (with about a half-dozen other people) was "quality control".  I'd pull out some clothes for special treatment:  costumes, new clothes with tags still on them, non-clothes that had somehow made it into the clothes piles.  Those went into the Gaylords that you see in the left above, headed for (??  not sure, but probably somewhere appropriate, I hope).   I also pulled out clothes that were unsuitable for sending overseas for other reasons: any image of an American flag, or camouflage, or nasty stuff (skulls, obscenities).  Those clothes (which could make their wearers targets for attack in other countries) went into another Gaylord, I'm guessing for domestic use.

And then I checked the remaining clothing for quality.  Any missing buttons at all, and the entire garment went into the rag bin.  Zipper doesn't work?  Rag.  Any tears or tatters, including "fashionable" tatters, rag again.  (In a refugee camp, tattered clothing isn't a sign of wealth or fashion).  I checked for stains, especially under armpits and on white clothes -- rags again.

I know that when I've given clothes away, I've occasionally had the mindset of "well, someone could fix this", or "well, even though it's not perfect, surely there's someone out there who would appreciate having something to wear."  The people who trained me kept pointing at the rows and rows of giant Gaylords full of clothes:  shipping is expensive, and nobody wants to pay to send damaged clothes overseas when there are so, so, so many boxes full of nice clothes to send.

I asked some of the teenagers working at the Quality table with me what this experience made them think about their own clothes: does this make them want more clothes?  Or fewer clothes?  They all were wide-eyed at the incredible excess, and said it made them want to have fewer clothes.   We were at the anti-Mall.

The rags weren't destined for trash, by the way:  they were still going to a marginally useful future.  They'd be torn up and turned into rags, sold (one person told me) for 10¢/ton.   If you care that your donated clothes will actually be useful, it's probably worth cleaning them and fixing buttons, but if that's impossible, the clothes are still probably worth donating rather than putting in landfills.  Bea of the Zero Waste Home recommends that if you have damaged clothing you want to give away, to clearly mark it as "rags".  I don't know if that actually works, but I think from now on, I'm going to try.

What happened after Quality Control?  My fellow QC'ers and I passed the clothes along to the next table--the sorting table--where the next round of volunteers sorted clothes into adult sized, child sized, winter ("Siberian winter", we were told, not "chilly African evening winter"), and a few other categories.  They passed clothes along to either the appropriate Gaylord or to the "adult" or "children" table.

The next table of volunteers "pre-folded" each piece of clothing once lengthwise, smoothing it out.  The last table was the skilled workers; they finished folding and packing the clothes into wooden boxes about the size of a hay bale.  This folding and packing was done very carefully so as to fill the box as completely as possible.  Because from there these hay-bale-shaped boxes went . . .

. . . to the baler.  Below there's a fuzzy picture of N-son working a manual fork-lift with pallets and boxes.  He, too, loved his job.  The balers would dump the packed clothes out of the wooden boxes into the baler machine, which would tie the clothes into a bale with just two plastic strips holding it all together.  This bale was wrapped in plastic sheeting for protection, labeled with contents, and stacked.  The minimal amount of packaging helps to keep shipping costs down.

What an experience this was!  We were surrounded:  surrounded by things, surrounded by hundreds of volunteers, and constantly being reminded that somewhere outside the walls of this warehouse we were in a world with almost 20 million refugees.    So much, and yet not enough.