Wholesale David's AW News: Bali Baby Home - Ancient Wisdom

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'm just about to take a shower.. and the villa door bell is ringing. I'm thinking's 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 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 days programme organised out of my hands.

With the AW-Advantage team and the Warehouse team.. can you spot James?

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.

All they were asking was help to fix the roof.

This is them at Christmas time now..

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, 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 formular and nappies, so we went and bought a car load 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 heart breaking stories behind each little person there.

At any time they have twenty or so abandoned babies and some mothers who help out along with volunteers to care for the babies. So much love and broad smiles, these little kids are desperate to love and be loved and the wonderful people here it seems to me doing a vitally important life saving job. It was hard not spend the morning in tears.

The remainder of the day I felt a feeling of devastation, quite upsetting that these young life's can start like this.

Anyway it is not far from our warehouse and we will visit again and see how we can practically help. I hope you feel like you can support this cause also.

Last week I was telling you about making contracts with artisans to give them a more secure income. This week we signed contracts for Hati Hati Angels, and a Molten Glass Bowl guy. The Hati Hati angels are out of stock more than they are in.. I'm hoping that we can change this. We also placed an order for the coloured glass bowls I was telling you about.

Coming soon..

Meanwhile back in the UK.. it's very very cold and large parts of the country are snowed under..

I hope you can stay safe and warm, and that the weather is not too disruptive to your business.

Lots of new products and back in stock items..

Take care

More news from Bali next week.

David