Aneya & Lauren: Working for the Red Cross ... and blackouts?

Lauren, in her spiffy new apron.
Me, holding a pack of liquid soap.
So. Much. Toothpaste. There are boxes under those, all filled with toothpaste.

Ahhh my toilet paper avalanche!
This is what we had to write on all 500 or so bags we made.
All those boxes are filled with food.
You can't even tell how big this really is, we couldn't get past the door!

Lauren: Aneya and I spent this weekend working with the Red Cross, opening boxes filled with goods donated from Antofagasta, a city in the north of Chile. We really had no idea what we were getting ourselves in for, but thought we'd swing by and ask about when we'd be leaving for the South. Next thing we know we're neck deep in boxes and boxes of toiletries.

Aneya: We hadn't heard any news from the Red Cross since the day we'd signed up to go South, so we decided to stop by their headquarters in Providencia to ask what was up. The minute we walked in they're like "You're volunteers? Great Here's where you need to go." Apparently they were a little low on helpers. Hey- we weren't doing anything, might as well check it out.

Lauren: We stopped by the Red Cross main headquarters to ask about when we would head to either Talca or Concepcion, and there wasn't much information readily available ... but were we available today? It was Saturday, sure why not. They send us over to the Red Cross receiving center in the sketchier part of town.

Aneya: We were in our gym clothes, out for a run, so we went home, had lunch, changed and headed over to the other Red Coss center, eager to see what they wanted us to do.

Lauren: We're lead to a dark room and told to just start opening boxes, and organizing whatever you found inside. Some people were really sweet, taking whatever they didn't need or maybe even did, and packing it away for their fellow Chilean in the South.

Aneya: We were given Cruz Roja aprons (pictured above) when we entered the building, which was actually just an old house. One room was filled to the brim with boxes and boxes of food, another room had mountains of garbage bags filled with clothes and another room-- the one we'd be working in-- was filled with toiletries.

Lauren: It was like an awful episode from "Hoarders". After a while everything just started to look the same. Was this shampoo or body wash? For some reason, my Spanish was failing me and the dim lighting in our little corner wasn't helping. We were really kicking some Red Cross ass, though. We had maybe over two hundred boxes of jumbled goods, sorted, opened, and organized. Everything was ready to be put in a family emergency kit. Aneya was working the toilet paper room like it was nobody's business, stuffing those rolls literally up to the ceiling. No breathing was allowed in the TP room, to prevent an avalanche of white tissue paper.

Aneya: The Red Cross boss came in and told us to start organizing things into piles- shampoo here, diapers here, soap here. It wasn't as easy as it sounds. There were literally mountains of unopened boxes to go through. But that's just what we did. We opened and organized all day long, our fingers aching by the end of day. I ended up in charge of the the toilet paper room, as I delicately placed roll after roll on the giant mountain I'd created, so big it literally reached the ceiling.

Lauren: While it was really touching to see people band together and spare anything they had, there were some things that were just rude or annoying. Some people must consider the Red Cross an alternative to the garbage can. I found a few empty bottles of things, but not many. Or old toothbrushes that dated back from the Allende Administration (was it an "administration"?). Things that once they were out of their box, would fall apart practically immediately. Not something that people in a State of Catastrophe really need.

And then there were the grandmas who wrapped things in three different bags, tied with six different knots, before wrapping the one bar of soap with Duct tape twelve times. Grandma, people need to get into this bag at some point. I luckily had a razor to cut things open. That was pretty maddening.

Aneya: It was really touching to see all things people had donated. You could tell some of that had just been used, like a half roll of toilet paper or a small bar of soap, painstakingly wrapped a million times. But still, people were trying. The variety of things was quite amazing. Enormous, expensive-looking bottles of shampoo, and then a toothbrush, yellowing and dirty, from the 70s. I don't want to give people that! They deserve better.

Lauren: The second day we got to assemble packets for families, and we seriously knocked that out of the park. We must have made at least 500 kits for families and it was amazing. Our family kits were piled taller than we were and we had to use another exit because we had trapped ourselves into one room.

At the end of each day our fingers ached from opening so many boxes wrapped in plastic, my back hurt from all the bending down, standing up, after five hours each day we were ready to call it quits.

Aneya: The second day we went right to work on making the family packets, which consisted of the following things:

1 soap (liquid or bar)

1 large shampoo

2 toothbrushes (adult)

2 children's toothbrushes

1 toothpaste

1 pack of sanitary pads

6 rolls of toilet paper

1 detergent

1 clorox

And that was just the small Caja Familiar there was a big one too, which we didn't get to, because all we had were plastic bags to put all these things in. We made hundreds and hundreds of these, sometimes slipping in extras, like deodorant or moisturizer, candles with matches (definitely good to have!) once we started running out of things. Honestly, the amount of pads was astonishing, we had at least four huge boxes filled with them! We found a single box of tampons, and Lauren goes "What's this?" That's how long it's been since she'd seen one!

Lauren: Strangely, the place seemed to be entirely run by teenagers. Where were all the adults? We met one person over the age of 17 once, who told us what to do, but other than that, we were stuck with moody, snobby 17-and-under kids! There was one other volunteer who came with her son, but the rest of the volunteers were young and had bad attitudes and didn't want to work! They just laid around half the time and were mean to us. It was totally what you wouldn't expect to see at the Red Cross.

Aneya: Ya, the bad attitude from the rest of the staff was definitely surprising. You would think, volunteers at the Red Cross would be nice, kind hearted people. And yet- the kids working with us were snobby, cliquey they didn't say a damn word to us all day. Lauren would ask them a question and they would just flat out ignore her. It was really rude and we couldn't understand what we'd done wrong. Was it because we were American? Or because we were ruining their good time by working our asses off? I couldn't tell you why.

Lauren: So by the end of Sunday we're beat. We spent the two days doing back breaking work, we're dirty, tired, and starved. So we get home and just have a beer, I'm reading my book, Aneya's in her room doing her own thing, when the lights dim and dim and dim until there's no light. We're sitting in total darkness. At that point I almost just went to bed right then, but figured I should consult Aneya and see what was going on.

Aneya: We got home, exhausted after a long day, we had dinner, I was in my room on my computer when the lights started dimming, then just went off completely. What's going on now? I swear to god, every day it's something!

Lauren: All the street lights, the traffic signals, everything was dark. 90 percent of the country was affected because a transformer blew out in BioBio. We stupidly, owned one candle a "Rdo. de Villarica" candle that Aneya got when we were in the South the first time. We didn't know what to do, but inexplicably, I was just immediately very hungry. Aneya and I got out the cheeses, crackers, bread, wine, everything we could find and just had a little picnic. Our electricity was restored within 30 minutes, but other people in Santiago were without electricity for hours. By this time we were stuffed, exhausted, and ready for bed.

Aneya: We took my little puny candle and sat at our little breakfast nook, eating and drinking in the dark and thinking about how insane our lives had become. And then, the lights came back on, and all was well. Except then a scary alarm when off in our building and we were afraid there was a fire or something. But it went away eventually, and we fell into bed, exhausted after another crazy day.

-- Aneya & Lauren