Successful Swap

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Patricia Lynch
Woodinville, Wash.

Last summer my husband and I met a young European woman in desperate need of help. Her husband—recently unemployed—was out of town looking for a job while she remained home to care for three small children. The mother was unable to work herself because the necessary papers and alien card were tied up in bureaucratic red tape.

We didn't realize the gravity of the situation until we stopped to visit her, saw the kids scraping the bottom of an empty peanut butter jar, and discovered that the family was unable to pay bills or to buy food. To make matters worse, the woman had no relatives in this country she could turn to for help.

Since Warren (my husband) and I aren't rich folks, we knew we couldn't support four additional people indefinitely ... but we certainly were NOT going to allow the family to starve. Somehow we scraped together several bags of groceries and a little money to tide the household over for a few days. Then the bartering began!

Warren has an uncanny ability for scrounging up goods that nobody else wants at either bargain prices or at the cost of a little (or, in some cases, a lot of) elbow grease. All that summer he collected wood, doors, paneling, light fixtures, and countless other miscellaneous items from a downtown urban renewal site.' For absolutely rockbottom prices the contractor-who held aft salvage rights to the stores and apartments being torn down-allowed my husband to go into the buildings before demolition and take whatever he could tear out and pile onto our trader.

In his travels throughout the abandoned stores, Warren picked up new—but slightly damaged-baby carriages, strollers, cribs, and cradles. At the time we had no need for the items ourselves. .. we just couldn't let them be buried by the wrecking crane. Their usefulness was demonstrated later when a church group took the articles and kindly provided bags of groceries for the hungry family. They then repaired the baby equipment to give to other needy households.

As the result of other excursions to the doomed downtown area, we soon owned a whole trailerful of eight-foot and four-foot fluorescent fighting fixtures—with bulbs—and an industrial timer. A farmer friend installed several of the lights and the timer in his milking barn and-in return—let us pick for two days in his field of sweet corn. The European woman, a friend, Warren, and I gathered enough corn to supply us all for the winter. We even managed to swap several bushels of the fresh vegetable to the same church group (for their Saturday night farmers' market) in exchange for more groceries.

Later the manager of a local wholesale grocery supply house—who was budding a new home at the time—jumped at the chance to trade all the cartons of canned goods and produce we could stuff into our VW (and we've had a lot of practice packing a VW!) for one toilet in excellent shape (again, taken from a building slated for demolition). As extra insurance, my husband spent about an hour helping the man pour concrete for a new loading dock and was promised more food—if needed—for the future.

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