It’s August.
Normal people are starting to think about fall. Pumpkins are creeping onto porches, stores are putting out mums, and somewhere someone is probably drinking something with pumpkin spice in it despite the fact that it’s still 90 degrees outside.
Much like Walmart, we have decided fall is unnecessary and moved directly to Christmas.
Every year about this time, our family begins a very specific Christmas tradition.
Some families put up a tree.
Some bake cookies.
The Castillos begin trying to determine exactly how much stuff can legally, physically, and spiritually fit inside a vehicle headed south.
For more than a decade, Christmas in Haiti has started long before December. It starts in the States with tubs stacked in garages, supplies spread across floors, and somehow finding room for the Amazon boxes that arrive three days after we declared everything officially packed.
Historically, we’ve always found the room. Not because it existed. We’ve just never considered full a particularly convincing argument.
For the first time in more than a decade, we won’t have our big annual shipment going to Haiti.
No trailer. No 50 or 70 or 100 tubs packed with everything from medicine, toothpaste and food to 1,500 glow bracelets, neon nail polish, plastic crowns and swords… and what sometimes looks suspiciously like we cleared entire aisles of the Dollar Tree.
Somewhere between soap and superheroes, the word essential admittedly gets a little fuzzy.
And this year, with less money and resources, you’d think choosing what makes the cut would be easy.
Medicine before dolls.
Rice before plastic crowns.
Toothpaste before fireworks.
Except I’ve seen the crowns.
I’ve watched a hundred little girls put them on and spend an afternoon being treated like princesses. I’ve watched boys run around with plastic swords like we’d handed them actual superpowers. I’ve watched a twelve-cent bracelet become something a child didn’t want to take off.
It’s not deciding between something important and something unnecessary. It’s deciding between what someone needs and something that makes them feel seen.
And once you’ve seen what something unnecessary can mean to a child, it becomes surprisingly hard to call it unnecessary.
To keep shipping costs from eating us alive, everything we drive down has to fit inside Ole Bessy here, our 2009 family vehicle who has already declared herself retired and too old for family road trips.
Naturally, we’ve responded by giving her a job in international shipping.
So we’re focusing on the essentials.
Medicine. Toiletries. Food.
The responsible stuff.
Although I fully intend to use small toys as packing peanuts, shoving them into every nook and cranny that would otherwise contain air. Because apparently even I have limits on how much valuable cargo space I’m willing to waste on oxygen.
We won’t be asking anyone to collect supplies or send us tubs this year.
Instead, we’re asking for help purchasing pallets of rice and beans in Miami to ship to Haiti.
Living in the Mole means we are quite literally at the end of the road. Supply trucks travel north selling as they go, and by the time they reach our little corner of Haiti, there often isn’t much left to buy. Finding the quantity of food we need locally can be difficult, unpredictable and expensive.
Buying in Miami and shipping it in has proven to be the safest and most reliable way for us to make sure the food actually reaches us.
So that’s our Christmas collection this year.
Rice. Beans. And as many families as we can feed.
If you’d like to help, we’d love for you to be part of filling those pallets.
Our hope is to have them purchased and headed toward Haiti in time to arrive by Thanksgiving.
And after everything this year has taught me about one more, I suppose this is one place I’m still perfectly happy asking the question:
Can we feed one more family?
To give directly toward these needs:
Mole Food
Checks Payable To:
NWHCM
PO Box 586
Lebanon, IN 46052
Designation: Mole Food
Scan the QR Code:
