Covid Care Diary: Wheelbarrows of Covid Care

MSJ Bangalore: 16th May 2020

Before the Covid care kits reach the needy, a lot of ground work takes place in our Loyola Schools campus which is turned into Covid care kit relief hub. Here we procure and distribute groceries, vegetables and other essential household items. This hub is almost abuzz whole day due to a number of things. There are a lot of things going on here. Volunteers and the organisational team are busy over seeing every detail of its purchase, classification, packing, loading and unloading and finally distribution. When we get things in a quantity of tonnes a lot of hard labour is required. In this context we make use of some machinery. 

In a country  like India machinery is still a distant luxury we try to use things that are at our disposal. Four of our wheelbarrows that we have been using have seen generations of Jesuits passing out Jesuit Novitiate at Mount Saint Joseph Campus. Two are with two wheels and the other two with four wheels. In fact all the wheelbarrows are from our Mount Saint Joseph house and its farm. Most probably they must have been made by the Italian Jesuits who built the Mount Saint Joseph complex. Surprisingly all these wheel barrows are still in perfect condition and have been using extensively these days at the hub. 

These wheelbarrows help us in some sense to reduce the weight of carrying. They also minimise the burden on our volunteers who have been already doing so much of work for quite sometime now. Using wheelbarrows is also a collaborative work. To pull the bigger cart we need not one or two persons but a number of people. These bigger four wheeled wheelbarrows are used to shift larger quantity of things from one place to another.

There is also a lot of fun in doing so. Any sort of confusion and careless working results in double work. There is a saying in Konkani, "Alshyak dodi kama", for a lazy person double the work. If you do not put the load on the barrows well and make a steady load, while pulling the barrows, the whole heap collapses. Since we are working in the school premises there are a number steps. Those who pull the wheel barrows should manure all these steps well. Otherwise, things go disarray. It so happened recently. You may see a video below which I happened to capture at that moment incidentally.

- Reported by Olvin Veigas, SJ
16th May 2020