This morning, I began my service project at Global Samaritan Resources. This organization is a Christian humanitarian nonprofit, headquartered in Abilene. It began in 1999 with a very simple mission in mind: collect surplus goods and share them with people in need. They started by working out of the back of a truck and stored donated goods in a borrowed garage. Today, they operate out of a 55,000 square foot warehouse and have supplied goods in Abilene and more than 50 countries on five continents!
The five areas they are most involved in now are:
- Supplying medical supplies to developing countries
- Providing food to refugees in war-torn countries
- Providing water purification systems and products anywhere they are needed
- Supplying disaster relief at home and abroad
- Providing dozens of Abilene non-profit partners with a wide array of supplies
This is an amazing organization! They do all that they do with a very small staff of six full-time and 3 part-time employees, so they heavily depend on volunteers to help meet the growing need of being “His hands and feet.”
As you might imagine, the logistics behind shipping a wide variety of material all over the world can be overwhelming! Everything must be intricately placed onto a shipping pallet, shrink-wrapped, then loaded into a shipping container – you know, the type of containers you see huge cargo ships loading in any port city. As Esther (the head of their logistics and my boss for the week) was giving me the tour of their warehouse she mentioned that up until a few months ago, they had to shrink wrap everything by hand! I can’t imagine what hard work this must have been – we’re talking about pallets with material stacked 8 feet tall and even higher! Then, she stopped at the new machine they recently installed that they are so proud of (and now I understand why)…a massive shrink wrap machine. And, my ears perked up when she told me that they were able to purchase this machine as a result of a generous donation from our DIG Foundation. How cool! I have to admit that my chest poked out a little more upon hearing this news! The photo below is a picture of the massive shrink wrap machine.
Tomorrow, I will begin loading medical supplies for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, along with loading food for a Kurdish refugee camp in Iraq.
