There's an old adage, "No good deed goes unpunished". It is sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde and there's even a song about it in the Broadway hit, "Wicked". I have, it seems, more often than not found it to be true. You try to help someone out or do something good and it ends up backfiring. And yet, I (and thankfully others) keep doing good deeds.
Several months ago, with this phrase in the back of my mind, I listened to Marie Da Silva, the founder of the Jacaranda Foundation and Orphanages share her story and her plans to build five libraries in Malawi. I watched in awe as the children of Sag Harbor Elementary School had a live Skype chat with several of the children in Malawi. After the presentation, and in spite of my full adult knowledge that what I was about to do would not go unpunished, I introduced myself to Marie and pledged to collect at least 1,000 books for her library.
Regular readers of Macaroni Kid may realize we have some great book publishers as sponsors, so my plan was to simply reach out and ask. There's another old adage...you don't ask, you don't get ... so I did. And to my great pleasure, Disney Publishing, MacMillan Press, National Geographic, Random House and more donated boxes of books. We were thrilled, but not near 1,000 yet.
Then I reached out to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a publisher we've never worked with at all, and I told them our mission and the story of Marie and Jacaranda Foundation. They said "Sure, we'll send you a gaylord". I said "Thank you so much!", and thought, "What the heck's a gaylord?".
From a quick Google search I learned that a gaylord is a giant box approximately four feet, by four feet, by four feet. Or enough to hold over 1,000 books! I was thrilled! Then my contact said "Here's a list of some we have available, pick one and a back-up in case the first one is already gone". Great, and I sent my reply. A week or so later I got a reply that BOTH gaylords would be delivered the following week-2,000 books!
Now here's where the punishment comes ... we don't have a warehouse, we don't get large deliveries on forklifts, we work out of a small office. When the two gaylords arrived, we had to break them down to get all the books in the office. It took over an hour to move them from the sidewalk to the office. We then had to box them up and carry them back out to our friend Kryn's pickup truck, a couple more hours of work. Each box now weighed about 50 lbs, and there were dozens of them. Sweat dripped down my back on a 30 degree day as I trudged one after another to the truck.
But all the while I envisioned the children of Jacaranda exploring the adventures of Curious George, The Little Blue Truck and the other stories we were packing up, and I didn't mind the work so much. The boxes felt a little lighter and I felt a little lighter. I was a punishment I hope to endure again someday soon.
