Greetings from Bali Indonesia,
This week James (operations wizard) arrived from the UK. His first business trip to Asia. Also the other day Raul (the IT wizard) came from his home in KL to take care of the AW-Advantage team.
James looks after AW-Fulfilment.co.uk (before that he was AW warehouse manager). He is keen to work with Raul to develop more functionality for our fulfilment customers and get more efficient use of our warehouse spaces across AW. He started by helping our man Ringo here in Bali reorganise the warehouse here.
Last week I was telling you about arriving in Bali, and discovering we are in the Rainy Season but without Rain.. If you missed it you can catch up here.
Well, it was my birthday last Saturday. A day I was hoping to let it pass without much fuss. But in Bali that's not allowed. It started early morning I was just about to take a shower.. and the villa doorbell was ringing. I'm thinking maybe it's the pool guy or the gardener. I pull on a t-shirt and pants to let him in... I open the door and all the staff are standing there with a birthday cake singing happy birthday..
They are old friends actually, in the early part of the pandemic from March 2020 I was stuck here with them all for a few months. Well, the day continued the same, flowers and cakes and birthday wishes, from all the staff at our warehouse, from the staff at the beach office from several suppliers. It was a full-day programme organised out of my hands.
On the morning of my birthday, Debbie our office manager thought it would be a good idea to visit a local charity and offer support. She knows that at AW we do this kind of thing...
I came across this picture from 2008... it's the Indian children's home we took under our wing.. this is from the day we found them.
So we went to visit an abandoned babies home, not far from our warehouse. It's called Bali Baby Home.
Sometimes unwanted babies are abandoned, and sometimes the mother and child are abandoned... it's terrible but the founder of this charity established a home to look after babies and then works to persuade the families to reunite with the baby. He travels all over Indonesia, collecting abandoned children and then works tirelessly to get them back home.
They requested baby formula and nappies, so we went and bought a carload and took it there. The founder wasn't there (he was on a mission to reunite a family in Java), but his very enthusiastic young staff gave us a tour and told us the heartbreaking stories behind each little person there.
