60,000 Volunteers Can't be Wrong

It's been a busy few days:

On Thursday I went to help out at Manny & Meg's Art Shed in West End. They carry a huge amount of stock normally, and when the floods came they only had time to rescue selected goods. They had to turf a huge pile of art supplies, and are trying to save another massive amount that was flood damaged which they will sell cheap or donate. I spent the morning cleaning tubes of paint, paintbrushes and other drawing materials together with other volunteers, including an ex-South African who had flown down from Cairns to help & a Bosnian sculptor who lives in Brisbane. Art supplies can cost a lot - I rescued a couple of thousand dollars worth in the time I was there.

 The inside of the Art Shed

One of the many bags of soiled stock

 Volunteers washing art supplies

Organising the stock that was saved from the floods

In the afternoon I went to help out at Volunteering Queensland - The organisation that puts volunteers together with the councils, emergency services, non-profits and charities that need them. Initially I was going to work on taking calls from volunteers or entering information into a database, but I quickly realised that most of the volunteers and permanent staff there are more "socially minded" than technology minded so I could help a lot more sorting out the data that had already been collected of 60,000+ volunteers. They realised that too and I quickly got given more tasks to do so went back on Friday (yesterday) and today. One of the things they were getting other volunteers to do is to copy registration information from emails from another 8,000 volunteers into their database one-by-one. I found a way to do it in one go it caused a bit of consternation today when they realised that I had just put ten volunteers out of work until they could find something else they needed them to do.

Our apartment repairs are going well but still needs work. Our lease ended today officially and we were supposed to move to the apartment downstairs, but everyone involved has agreed that it can wait until the building is habitable again. We have also convinced the owner to waive rent from when we had to evacuate and we will donate the rent money to the Flood Relief Fund instead - Actually on behalf of Charl & Joanna seeing as we're staying with them. Hopefully we will be able to move back to our apartment around the end of January.

It's been hard work the past couple of weeks. I'm going to take the day off tomorrow!