Growing up I was never a doll girl. I didn’t spend hours
dressing and re-dressing, brushing hair and hosting tea parties; instead, I was
all about the teddy bears. When I was young (okay, a teenager) I used to
collect bears. I worked at a toy store in high school and the job fed my
existing love of plush toys to an out of control level. They absolutely
overwhelmed and littered my bedroom, until I inevitably left home for
university at 18.
In the near decade since I moved away from home, my mother
has been bugging me about what I am going to do with the occupying force the near
two hundred bears have become in her basement. I haven’t been able to decide. I
didn’t want to sell them, or just bring them to a second hand store. They had
been important to me, and while I knew that there was no way I could keep them,
either at my mom’s house, or in my apartment in Ottawa, I didn’t want to give
them up without good cause. I wanted them to go to people who would love them
even more than I would. I wanted them to go to people who needed them. Finally,
Mom and I made a deal.
It was Easter weekend 2013 and I was at home, completing an
application for an internship with the United Nations Association in Canada to
be a Junior Professional Consultant (or JPC) with the United Nations
Development Progamme (UNDP) in Nepal. Mom started hauling the bags and boxes of
my bears up from the basement and instructed me to take photos of them, because
they had to go.
“Bronwyn,
how about: if you get this position, you take 10 of your bears with you and
give them to kids there that don’t have anything else. Then, the next
developing country you go to you take 10 more, and by the end of your career in
development your bears will be spread out all across the world?” It was an idea
I’m not sure anyone could argue with. And even if they could, I certainly
didn’t want to, I loved it. It was the perfect solution to my teddy bear
dilemma. I know how excited I used to
be as a child to get a toy. The idea of being able to bring that much happiness
to that many children around the world was more than I could have ever hoped my
bears could be worth.
So the conditional plan was set, and then, as luck would
have it, I did get the JPC position
in Nepal, and the plan was put into action. In the week before I left the
country for the six month posting I gathered all my bears from the basement and
selected the lucky ones for this first phase of my Operation Teddy Bear,
stuffed them into a vacuum seal bag, sucked the air out and jammed them into
the bottom of my suitcase. Children on Nepal, here we come!
Meet “Team Nepal”
What a great idea and how very wise is your mother? Each of these bears will have brought you joy twice. Once when you received them, and again to see the reaction on the face of the child you entrust it to. Well done!
ReplyDeleteLove you,
Aunt Lynn