Covid Care Diary: New Arrivals - Unloading and Packing

MSJ, Bangalore: 29th April 2020

Today was a day filled with a number of activities. We received a number of loads of essential commodities like vegetables, oil, dal, etc. Grocery procuring and distribution hub saw many things happening today.

In the morning hours Jesuit Novices packed more than 500 kits filling them with rice, toor dal, oil,  soaps, masala powder packet, sugar, salt, and different kinds of vegetables namely, tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, onions, etc.


Making Covid care kits take a lot of time. But our Novices are very quick in their movements. They passed packets from one hand to another, shifted things from one class room to the main packing courtyard and did the miracle of packing 500 kits. It's almost like Jesus doing that miracle of feeding 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish. One care kit must supply food for at least 10 days to a family of four people. If a person has three meals per day then if we calculate it for four people means everyday 12 meals are cooked in a house. 12 meals into 10 days is 120 meals, that means 500 care kits should enable to have at least 60,000 meals. I suppose it's a good miracle indeed!

Our neighbours in the Mount St Joseph campus are Trinitarian Fathers. Their brothers too came in the afternoon and prepared another 500 care kits. So, in total we had 1,000 care kits produced within a day meant for 1,000 families. This in turn should produce 1,20,000 meals, in other words, 1,000 families with average 4 members in a family should be able to have meals for 10 days without any problem. 

We unloaded a few tonnes of vegetables mainly sweet pumpkins - two and a half tonnes, carrots - and capsicum - one and half tonnes each, onions and reddish - one tonne each. The person who provided us these vegetables told us that he provides a very fresh vegetables and comes directly from the farms around the Electronic City in Bangalore. Usually, he sends around 25 tonnes of vegetables on a daily basis to the markets during the usual days.

But due to Covid lockdown things are really bad with his business. As supply chain is broken people like us keep his business afloat. However, farmers are incurring terrible losses. I found Mani the dealer is very excited to help us. Through our conversation I found out that he is very passionate of marketing the farmers produce. According to him, he has already donated  25 lakhs worth of farm produce for various organisations who are doing relief work. We have procured these produce thanks to Fr Teyol's contact, who has sponsored these produce to our distribution. 

Another consignment that we got is 200 bags of Toor dal weighing each bag 50 kilos each. A total of one tonne. This is sponsored by the Diya Ghar Organization with whom we have been collaborating very closely since the beginning of our Covid care kit relief work in our surrounding areas. Our usual volunteers and workers in our institutions unloaded all these tonnes of loads without any complaints. Even though they are not used to this kind of work due to the urgency of the current situation, they are ready to do any kind of work. Certainly, we are not only adding value to our Covid care kits but also variety and healthy nutritions to people's diet.

 Reported by Olvin Veigas, SJ

29th April 2020