Today I was back at Mercy’s warehouse in Kuala Lumpur, this time with 4 friends. These men are Malaysia Airlines Trainee Engineers who volunteered to help us out.
As you can see this was a daylight operation. The job today was to pack medical equipment and supplies into plastic containers to a maximum of 500 kilograms. This being the amount free freight allowance donated by MAS KARGO. There were also a few other limitations and requirements that made the packing quite a chore.
Tzy Wen: “Hmmm, doesn’t this look like an oil sampling kit?” Ray: “Hey get back to work guys!”
That’s what they call a stomach tube…go look it up.
Yeah some of the stuff really looks and sound strange. What do we know, we’re just engineers. Anyway, as I said earlier the packing was not as straight forward as throwing everything into those blue boxes. Each box sent must weigh no more that 50 kilograms. The smallest of the blue boxes weighed 7 kilograms. After the initial packing we found that we were close to the 500 kilo limit with a lot of stuff left over.
Afiq: “Repack? I might need some of the medicine myself before the day is over!”
So that’s what we did. We practically repacked all 12 boxes again in an effort to send everything. We managed to reduce the number of boxes by 3, saving a whopping 21 kilos. This time we got everything in plus a little bit more! Good job guys. We still used 5 small boxes and 7 large ones which in themselves must have weighed well over 100 kilos in total.
The 12 boxes you see above contains enough medical supplies to set up a field hospital for 1000 patients. These will be shipped out on Wednesday morning to Myanmar. The people at Mercy wish to thank these young men for volunteering their valuable time and energy. In a time when everyone is busy trying to get ahead in the rat race (some people I sent sms asking for help did not even have the time to reply!), it is good to know that there are still some who are willing to take time out to help those in dire need of help. Thanks guys.
hey we didn’t say all that! haha