Giving Birth to Baby Elephants

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Snip Snip, Spray Spray, Paint Paint... It must have been many years since I last attended art class doing just that... Really never would I have thought that I would be doing something like that again hahaha...

Tomorrow is my organisation's staff appreciation dinner and me and my colleagues were busy with the final preparations for tomorrow's event, anticipating more than 300 people... One thing I like about my current organisation is that despite it being huge, it remains very clear on proper stewardship of what God has blessed us with, focusing on only necessary expenses on the care of our beneficiaries. Over the last one year plus I am here, I can see this from the working culture here, especially in my department; every little thing we do, we try to spend wisely and prudently; using donated furniture, making sure we consolidate our stationary purchases and using discount cards, taking buses whenever we travel for work purposes, whenever possible. So as you may have guessed, we have no fanciful budget for our staff dinner tomorrow. So, literally everything is in-house produced, none other than, by us la :)

By mid afternoon, some of us have already kicked off our shoes, went down (literally) "on all fours" and started cutting white elephants. Nope, we are not planning a "white elephant" protest on some unopened train station, but we were preparing the elephants more for decoration for tomorrow's dinner. :) So I went snip snip snip, spray spray spray while my colleagues went paint paint paint, donning the elephants with golden trimmings :)

Giving the baby elephants the finishing touches :)

It is really fun getting all our hands dirty, working and having fun together as a department :) Guess I won't be able to really experience something like that outside (including how I had to scrub a donated cupboard and how I spent a long time walking around Popular bookstore to maximise the dollar :)). In fact, it was quite paisay that a prospective volunteer walked in and found me "on all fours" without my shoes on, cutting the elephants :)

I really do thank God for bringing me to this place. I am not sure how long I will be here but in the meantime, I am grateful to have such nice colleagues and all the nice people I have met here... really, from the bottom of my heart.

The department's war-torn floor