Mano a Mano is currently loading 3 containers with medical supplies, mobility equipment, and other in-demand items at our Minnesota warehouse, for distribution to people and organizations in need throughout Bolivia.
What Do We Do With the Shipping Containers We Send to Bolivia from Minnesota?
For each shipment, we purchase the shipping containers (rather than renting); this saves us money by ensuring we don’t incur large additional fees if the shipment takes longer (it takes up to 6 months to go from our St. Paul warehouse, clear Bolivian Customs, and eventually arrive at our Cochabamba warehouse), but the containers themselves are also very useful for our programs in Bolivia. We can sell them, use them for storage at our warehouse, use them as makeshift fencing, and turn them into mobile housing for our staff when they are working for weeks or months at a time on projects in isolated rural areas.
Using Shipping Containers as Storage and Mobile Housing/Offices in Punata – April 2023
The daily work continues on the Mano a Mano runway to which the Mano a Mano aviation program will be relocated in 2024. We offered to exchange the building of community-requested projects for land in the local community (these projects include a new school, new water well and water tower, and road, among others; most of these community projects were completed in 2022). We have named the entire comprehensive project the Punata Regional Complex. And we have turned 3 shipping containers from Minnesota into a place for storage and mobile housing/offices, which are very useful for the Punata Regional Complex.
