DECISIONS, DECISIONS

When anyone plans a move, hard decisions inevitably have to be made about what to take and what to leave behind. For us, we did not want to take a great deal of things so we tried to take the bare minimum. Furniture was sold and some stored away in our gracious relatives' sheds. My parents, who had just moved from a small unit to a house, also provided invaluable assistance in taking a lot of the large items.

The lawnmower went (hooray!) as did all the gardening equipment. I love a good garden but they are a full time job and I am much happier without one. The BBQ was sent off to a new, loving home. This proved to be a wise idea. It would have gathered dust as good sausages and steaks are nowhere be found.

All the childrens' toys were kept to start up the toy library for the preschools in the slums. These are treasured and returned meticulously on each visit. We sold the childrens swing set and trampoline, much to their dismay. However, Brenton's good friend has a swing set and trampoline which they can now use on every visit.

Cutlery, glasswear, crockery and cooking utensils made the long journey. Hayley was not going to give up on cooking and, after just polishing off a muffin, I am convinced this was the right move. However, we have carried all the glasses and dinner sets in suitcases back to Australia as the house we are in came complete with these items.

Children's books came, once again as a good start up for the library, and these English books seem to be more popular than the locally bought Sinhala books. Our rather large collection of books remained with their shelves at my parents' house for their perusal.

The most difficult decision was what to do with my tools. As a carpenter, I enjoying building and fixing things and I don't like paying someone else to do it. Selling the tools was not an option and storage seemed like a waste of their purpose. Eventually I settled on leaving the large, single-purpose tools behind. Although they can make a job faster, most jobs can be done without them. Since being here I have built some shelves and fixed some doors and changed washers and general fixing, so the tools have been useful, but not indespensible. I wanted to find something that I could use them for that would help in our work here. It wasn't until a visit to one of the pre-schools that I realised what I could do.

These schools depend on donations as the parents are too poor to offer any form of payment. We help by offering games, toys, jigsaws and books for them to borrow, similar to the toy libraries that we have back in Australia. At this stage, we have been unable to bring in any large items that can be used in the schools. I noticed that they had very little play equipment. They had wanted one of those plastic cubby houses which, we were to discover, cost more than they do in Australia. From this came the idea to build some cubby houses for the library. Below are some pictures that were taken after we dropped off the first prototype. You be the judge of if I made the right decision to bring the tools.