In the run up to Eid, Care 4 Calais had received a lot of requests for abayas and had been given a huge number of them as donations by a mosque. Today's task for GoodGym Ealing was to bag up the requests, ready to be delivered in the evening.

Michelle returned for her second task with Care 4 Calais in a week and was generous enough to bring some clothes donations, while Eliz was helping there for the first time and had managed to change into some clothes that weren't caked in clay after the morning task at Grove Farm.

At the start of the session, Michelle and Sevan learned that abayas were sized by height, generally from 50 to 60, which matched the wearer. Helpfully, the boxes were laid out sorted by size and had been filtered by a Muslim woman who knew what she was doing. Each pack was to contain 3 abayas, with at least one being black and 3 headscarves, with 1 black, 1 patterned and 1 new to keep things fair for the recipients. The team started with the shortest requests, the size 50s, and worked upwards in height. Everyone found that the work was quite relaxing as every request was similar, so they got into a good rhythm.

The first abayas were quite conservative. Then they found some more modern prints and soon after Eliz raised a concern. Was an abaya with a floral print actually a nightie? It might be. Tamzin took a look and it was, so Eliz was rightie. So much for the clothes being pre-filtered. Other non-conforming "abayas" were found, which were pyjamas, jumpsuits or summer dresses 👗. They all went into a rejects box to be used for other purposes as they were still useful donations.

Time was tight and the packs needed to be completed by 5pm, so everyone stayed a bit longer, working with Tamzin and a new Care 4 Calais volunteer to finish the last requests. As the GoodGymers wrapped up, the completed packs were piled high all around the first floor, ready for the driver who'd be arriving soon. Great work team! 🙌🎉👏

Care4Calais' West London HQ was quieter than normal today. There were bags of donations to be sorted and a smaller than usual number of new clothing requests to be bagged and tagged.

Sevan teamed up with Michelle on her first visit to Care4Calais. They were given bags and suitcases full of clothes that were all jumbled together and were asked to put them in some sort of order. There were plenty of warm jacket donations as the weather had been promising to improve and as usual, plenty of clothes with no or confusing sizing. Some undersized crop tops and shorts were unsuitable, so put to one side for charity donation, while a pair of oversized mens trousers marked size 26 could fit a Sevan in each leg. They were eventually placed in the 2XL box.

In another room, Kash and Steph were preparing standard clothing packs for men, except they didn't have any underwear. The packs that was, not the GoodGymers 🤭. They did what they could, leaving the packs to be stock(ing)ed up later. Kash and Steph then moved on to preparing requests, including a few complex ones that led Kash into the garden to hunt for micro scooters. She returned victorious, having found a pink scooter for a young girl and two more for some older boys.

To complete today's work, everyone took a pile of the newly sorted donations and stored them in a box in the stock room, matching the clothing type and size. Those will be ready to prepare more clothing packs at GoodGym's next session with Care4Calais next week.

Six days after GoodGym Ealing's last visit to Care 4 Calais, a lot had happened. Boxes and boxes of new stock had arrived, all with red writing on the side. Task owner Tamzin explained that using the clothes in these boxes was verboten and that the reasons were complicated. Instead, lots of the other clothing had moved around to make space, meaning that everyone had a fun game of hide and seek to try and complete their requests.

The GoodGymers were mostly left to their own devices, unless they needed help, with a steady stream of requests to complete. Some were simple like finding a pair of shoes or an XL hoodie. Some were more complicated, like digging out school uniforms or guessing the size of abayas. Others needed some black market deals. Men's winter jackets were like rocking horse poo and needed special approval. Equally, there was a drought of umbrellas, unless you had the right contacts.

All the requests that could be completed were bagged and labelled. The more unusual that couldn't be sourced, like a volleyball, school skirt or even a wallet will need to wait. Maybe they too will appear on the black market soon 🫰.

Mohamed, Sevan and Kash set off for a run from Pear Tree Park and retraced their steps to the OSCARS café on Pitshanger Lane. After a lunch break, their last session that Sunday was just a short jog away. Madiha met the trio at the task after her uphill bike ride. It was great to see her again after a break!

Tamzin from Care4Calais offered the GoodGymers coffee before cracking on with the task. It was the perfect time to announce the latest GoodGym Ealing news: Mohamed's black belt in good deeds - namely, 50 good deeds! Well done, Mohamed. Your unwavering enthusiasm for volunteering and dedication to the Care4Calais cause could not go unnoticed!

Today's job was all about creating labelled packs for individual refugees. Sevan stayed at the ground level at the beginning, assuming the role of a label scribe, which looked like the last thing GoodGymers look for: a desk job! Meanwhile, Mohamed was already making clothes parcels, assembling sets of small, medium, large and extra-large items for men and women. Madiha and Kash, new to creating packs, tried their best not to look confused. Among all the ambiguity, one thing was certain: every refugee lady deserved a scarf - or three of them! The donations of scarves were so abundant that Tamzin decided they had to be given out to not take as much space.

The team created impressive piles of packs for several West London hotels providing shelter for asylum seekers, which hopefully helped Tamzin to catch up on the requests made by refugees during her break!

GoodGym Ealing's latest visit to Care 4 Calais had them working through a familiar set of tasks, which they've been building experience in over the past few months. By the end of the task:

• 🛍️ A stack of clothing bags were created, ready for delivery to Care 4 Calais' beneficiaries;
• 👞👚 -> 📦 Shoes and women's clothes donations had been sorted and stored;
• 👟👟 2 identical right shoes were found. Only the task owner's sharp eyes realised that it was a wrong pair of shoes

Earlier, the team had helped bring new, very cold, donations inside to sort through. Once they (the clothes) defrosted, Kash, Paul and Mohamed got to work, first sizing the shoes that had been received, then separating the clothes into men's, women's and children's piles. The majority of the new clothes were for women which Mohamed and Kash stayed to do the next round of sorting on. T-shirts, legs and warm top categories were broken down by sizes from XS to XL. There were donations of Indian clothes as well as some from a mosque, so Kash learned from Mohamed how to identify abayas from non-abayas.

In the packing area, Paul and Sevan had created new standard packs for small and large men. No new packs for medium men today as clothes stocks in their size were low. The pair then moved on to fulfilling specific requests, with Sevan hunting in the stock rooms for children's school clothes for the first time. The completed bundles of clothes kept increasing and Paul neatly organised them by destination.

Any unsorted donations were left for the next volunteers to pick up and clothes that wouldn't be needed for a few months were packed into suitcases to go into storage. Kash was sent away with the suitcases. She may or may not make it out of storage for the next group run to Walpole Park on Tuesday.

Care 4 Calais had received another load of donations which task owner, Tamzin, had asked for help to sort through. Mohamed, Kash, Steph and Sevan braved the rain and wind to dive into the giant bags and see what was what.

Mohamed, Kash and Steph started by sorting the adult clothes donations by gender and then by size, creating neat piles for XS people through to XL people. Some of the sizes had to be eyeballed as labels were missing or the clothes had come from countries with totally different sizing systems, leaving the GoodGymers confused. As usual, some of the donations weren't suitable styles for those who'll receive them, so they were separated out to be passed onto other charities.

Elsewhere, Sevan was working alongside Tamzin to prepare clothing packs that would be delivered tomorrow, adding shoes, jackets or other items to the standard sets. Unlike last time, there were no unusual requests, only awkward sizes where stock was low. There turned out to be some duplicate clothing packs though, which luckily were caught by the pair before being dispatched.

By the end of the task, everyone was reunited sorting clothes. Once the adult donations were completed, there was the fun task of working with children's clothes. No one present had children, so there was a lot of guesswork involved to work out which age bracket each jacket, t-shirt or sweater would fit in. They were told by Tamzin not to worry too much as it would work itself out.

By the time the team left, the sorted donations were ready for the next volunteer group to prepare new clothing packs with and the completed clothing packs were ready to be delivered. A good achievement on the first day of the year.