Nearly there!

I'm counting down the days until I fly out now! Flights are booked for the 17th July from Heathrow, flying Turkish Airways into Dar es Salaam. 
Everyone was raving on about how painful the Yellow Fever jab was, but I've definitely had worse. It wasn't a deep one and  luckily I haven't had a reaction to this one! I've just come down with cold and flu symptoms. Ahh well. Could be worse. My arm could swell up like after my meningitis injection!

Mosquito net bought, I'm pretty much prepared now for my volunteering trip of a lifetime!

Pictures coming soon!

7th May - Container loading!

7th May saw us journey to the Big Yellow Self Storage in Balham, London, to load up the collected books and send them on their long voyage to Tanzania. 

 The group of us, from various different universities, worked for 5 hours in beautiful sunshine to make sure we left no box behind. 

Before the hard work began we feasted on volunteer leader Will's great oreo cheesecake and lemon drizzle cake which went down a treat!

Box-stairs were made to lift the individual boxes up into the container. An interesting job for someone like me with hardly any upper body strength! Boxes were stacked 5 high across the container with the most well packed and fullest boxes on the bottom. Next came the fork lift truck for Nottingham and Queen Mary's wrapped pallets of books. These were easier to load :D 

The day was a brilliant success, and we were all really excited to say goodbye to the container before it was next opened in Dar es Salaam. It's great to know that I'll be opening up some of these boxes and putting them on shelves and into the hands of secondary school children in a school in Tanzania in a month. SO EXCITED.

We lock the container before its long journey!

 The READ Team!