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Team Reports
• Ken Graham
• Nancy Holt
• Elaine McDougall
• Sandra Dryden
• Dave Dryden
• Anthony Ng

You can also download a PDF version of this report from our Distributions page.

The Polangui Water Boy

Elaine McDougall — Kettleby, ON

You may have heard of the Dutch boy who held his finger in the dyke and the foolish boy who cried wolf. I would like to tell you about “The Polangui Water Boy” who brought joy.

We were fortunate on this trip to speak with several bedkit recipients from previous years. At our last distribution site in Polangui, the word had gone out through the crowd that, if previous bedkit recipients were available, the team would like to meet them.

Just as we were finishing the last packing up details, a smiling young man stepped forward to tell us that he had received a bedkit as a young child.

What a wonderful moment!

Through an interpreter we learned that his name was Archie, he is one of nine children, he is now sixteen years old, and he is planning to study electronics.

Archie was happy to share his recollections of the bedkit he had been given. His favourite item was the blanket! His smile and genuinely positive comments about the whole experience spoke of the importance of the donors’ gift for him and his family.

Well into the conversation it came up that he was given the bedkit ten years ago when he was six years old. My father, team leader Ken Graham, had tears of joy well up in his eyes because he had been the team leader for that distribution and had given Archie his bedkit. My father doesn't cry often, but tears of joy came as he could see the direct result of the gift he had been privileged to deliver ten years earlier.

So why do I think of him as the “Polangui Water Boy” who brought joy? We hadn't realized it until the translator told us, but Archie had volunteered to be the water boy for the team that day!

The full circle had been completed. Six-year-old Archie and his family had benefited from a Sleeping Children bedkit a decade earlier, and now he was a local volunteer helping the SCAW team deliver bedkits to other desperately needy children in his own community. Perhaps you, too, feel some of the joy brought by “The Polangui Water Boy.”