CONTAINER PARTY
I know I've said it before but it's best to never say never when your working for God. Over my years of working in Haiti I've been involved in shipping six containers of materials, equipment and medical supplies and three vehicles to Haiti. The last time I shipped which was in 2008 I vowed that was my last time to ship a container or a vehicle which I had done in 2007.
The reason being is it takes a lot of work from the U.S. side of mission work to make it happen. You have to find a container and purchase it or persuade the owner to donate it, then you have to make it road ready so it can be pulled out to New York City to be shipped. Purchasing, repairing and getting it titled, plated and DOT inspected can run as much as $1200.00. Then you have to get it moved out to the shipping company on the East coast which means getting a semi and driver willing to pull it out for us, in the past we have gotten this donated. The shipping charges for our 30 foot containers usually run about $3900.00. Then you have to deal with getting it out of Customs after it arrives in Haiti, which can run another $3,000.00 and lots of time and headaches. Our last container which should have been a breeze to get out took 5 months.
If you crunch the numbers you can see that what we put into our 28 x 8 x 8 container needs to be worth at least $8100.00 or $4.52 a cu. foot. If we have to pay the truck driver we could be looking at least another $2,000.00 in additional costs which would make your cu.foot costs $5.64. It's because of these costs that most of what we ship is donated material and equipment, if we purchased everything that we shipped then added on our shipping costs we might as well buy it in Haiti. Even so we have to send quality goods and items that exceed our shipping costs or things that are not readily available in Haiti.
This morning with the help of some of the North Manchester Congregational Christian Church members we started loading container # 7 for shipment later this year. What made me decide to do another container was the generous donation of picking out whatever and how much we wanted in materials from Ead's Salvage Yard. We loaded hundreds of 2 x 4' s , 2 x 6's , 2 x 8's and 2 x 10's. Metal roofing, doors, nails, bolts plumbing fittings, shovels, rakes and carpenter tools. It was sort of like going to Home Depot and loading as much as you could drive away with, in our case a 28 foot trailer. We still have lot's more things that we have collected and had in storage that we will load on in the next several months but eventually there won't be anymore room and it will be time to send it on to Haiti. This time things have been going very well to this point so who knows maybe we will stay in the shipping business after all.
In God's love, steve
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