On Saturday, November 9th, NC BLOOM volunteers Yuyang Luo (Cindy), Yuanduo Li (Chris) and Yinuo Zheng (Enock) came to their Kenyan friend Lydia’s home in Chapel Hill to help pack items donated by NC BLOOM (later shipping to Kenya, Africa).

For more than ten years, Lydia has been caring about her impoverished home country and has been donating daily necessities, food and clothing from the United States to Kenya. NC BLOOM, a newly established youth-led nonprofit organization in North Carolina, learned about Lydia’s deeds and sent its first volunteers Cindy, Chris and Enock to help her.
At 11 A.M., the volunteers, coming from different places, gathered at Lydia’s house. Their task today is to pack all the collected items according to shipping specifications. In Lydia’s backyard, they first unfolded the flattened cardboard into boxes, then taped the edges of the boxes, and put in quilts (to protect fragile items) and waterproof cloths (because the donations would be transported via waterway) to cover the walls and bottom of the box. They added donations step by step and compressed as much as possible until the boxes were full.

To further protect the donations, they also tore pieces of cardboard to fill the edges of the boxes. After compressing and closing the box, they wrapped it with waterproof tape, and tied it tightly with thick hemp rope. An accident occurred during this time: in order to save shipping costs, each box was filled to the limit and required vigorous compression to seal. As a result, a box bursted under the heavy pressure and could no longer be used, but the volunteers were not discouraged; they transferred all items to a new box, learned their lesson, and continued to work hard.

Five hours later, the volunteers finally filled the four large boxes with all the donations, moved them into the house, and were ready to go. Lydia, expressing her thanks, cooked a delicious Swahili-style meal with the volunteers. Lydia smiled, “next time you come, I’ll cook you something different. Like how you serve the community, I also serve the community.” The volunteers also expressed their gratitude to Lydia for providing NC BLOOM with the service opportunity. NC BLOOM will continue to help Lydia and carry out various charity events in the future.