OK, so perhaps this is a cop out, but I'm not feeling a serious post right now and I can't think of anyone who would be my favorite person from history that wouldn't sound cheesy, so...I'm going to use the word 'person' and the word 'history' VERY loosely. Meet Lucas.
Which one is Lucas, you say? The suitcase of course. He wears a permanent name tag.
Now that you are thoroughly confused, let me explain. Anyone who has read the Panama blogs knows that life gets a little intense on the islands. I mean when this seems like a relaxing moment you have problems.
So, you take your moments of entertainment where you can get them. And this actually starts prior to ever stepping foot on the islands. The process of packing meds can make a person go a little crazy as well. We have literal pallets of medicine to deal with! After the medicine is broken down from the manufactures packaging (which wastes tons of space and weight) and redistributed into ziplocks (much less space and weight), the meds are organized into suitcases. Last year we tried something new and had people assigned to know what was in each of the suitcases at all times so that we could answer any questions about them and so that we could find anything we needed. Jen and I were assigned this task, which involved organizing the medicine by island so that each island got equal amounts of each type of med, organizing those into bags so we knew what was in each bag and then assigning an number to have an easy reference (i.e. in the case of finding out a kid just split his head open, Jen and I could grab our lists and yell 'pull bag 10, we need the suture kit...oh and you think I'm kidding about that don't you).So, all that to say that when we were organizing and numbering all the bags we found Lucas. Lucas has traveled with us to the island for many years, but for some reason he's never received a number (the bags were often numbered we just didn't really use the numbers all that much). If you look at Lucas again you may be able to guess the number we assigned him. 11. His yellow straps made it look like he had already chosen his number and for some reason this made us laugh really hard, and as a result made us love Lucas. Then the fact that we had a name for Lucas made us love him more and made us start referring to him as him rather than it, which made us laugh harder, which made us love Lucas all the more...I think you see my point here. At the end of the trip when we were deciding which suitcases to leave with the extra medicine for our soldiers we did not have to think very long before we knew that Lucas was made for the assignment (if you don't know why we had soldiers please refer to the About Panama section). We were sad to see Lucas go, but he is now happily traveling the Kuna Islands with our soldiers making their lives hopefully a little bit better rather than being locked up in a storage unit for 9 months out of the year.
Which brings us to this year's med packing. We have 13 people going this year, which means we can take 26 bags, which is awesome because it means we can take more medicine, but it also means we didn't have enough suitcases. Jen and I, being assigned the suitcase organization job again, went on search of cheap suitcases that would fit the bill. Goodwill was not assisting very much (although we did finally find some at one of the Goodwills in Charleston), so we hit up T.J. Maxx...where we found a new Lucas!
As it turns out there is a whole family of Lucases! Big Lucases, little Lucases, carry-on Lucases, backpack Lucases - it was AMAZING!
Jen and I ended up being able to get two big roller Lucases for medicine and then we found a little Lucas backpack for her. And then yesterday, Jen showed up at church and said 'oh, Becky I forgot, I found something that I thought you may want to take to Panama'...and produced...
...my very own Lucas. And so, I think the moral of day 29 is a) Lucas is awesome and b) Panama packing makes people crazy :)
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