ADVENTURES IN MOVING

It's summer time. It's a good time to move and, with the Calgary housing market cooling down a bit, a few of my friends are moving. I believe that helping someone to move is one very practical way of serving others.

So, after much tortuous indecision, S finally took the plunge and bought himself a townhouse on the edge of town. It couldn't have been a nicer day to move, as there was a break from the heat wave Calgary has been enduring. It just so happens that, a few days later, I had committed to help out with another move. This time, it was for a senior lady that I didn't know, but which was arranged through the church who often spearheads emergency moves of endangered women into shelters. Having done two moves in less than a week, I have discovered some muscles that have been recently neglected and they let me know with much enthusiasm that they were still there.

By all accounts, one would think that moving S, a single bachelor guy, might be more challenging. Guys typically don't pack very well, if at all. Plus, in an effort to save some money, he opted with the cargo van from U-haul. But, everything fit and it only took us one trip, a relatively painless move.

The move for F was not so painless. She had nothing packed and what was packed was done so rather inefficiently: half empty boxes, some boxes that were extremely heavy while others were extremely light, and all the small items were in the doorway leaving us with no choice but to pack the little things first before getting to the large items. As well, she had some paranoia about having the bed disassembled, so we had to move the frame as is. The U-haul van used for this move was a 14' truck, more than twice as large as the cargo van. By looking at everything she had, I was worried that there wouldn't be enough room. And it wasn't the physical labour that grieved me most about the move. IT WAS THE FACT THAT SHE HADN'T DUSTED HER PLACE IN 8 YEARS. I'm typically not allergic to dust, but very shortly, I was sneezing and my nose was sprinting. The walnut cabinet where the TV sat was the worst: the dark brown shelving plank was solid white with a layers and layers of dust. I believe I now know the worst way that anyone can die, and that is suffocation by dust.

Anyways, this doesn't deter me from wanting to serve this way. It was just interesting contrasting the 2 moves. In fact, I am loving this "manual labour" thing so much that, from October 20 to November 12, I will be going to Masoyi, Mpumalanga (about 200 km east of Johannesburg in South Africa) to assist Hands At Work in building a new facility.