Omar’s Family & Friends

As the Covid lockdowns have eased we have been busy and we welcomed our first fully vaccinated volunteer group—our good friends from the Garcia Hoyos family and their friends.  Ever since Omar David Garcia Hoyos passed away four years ago, his family and friends have been remembering and celebrating his life with volunteer days at CUE Haven. 

Friends and family on site today included Ahmed, AJ, Alba, Alex, Catherine, Dastan, Hernan, Kara, Lizzie, Omar, Riz, Rosie, Vanessa, Zeena, and toddlers Aisha and Emi.

The group arrived around 10 and we had morning tea. Due to restrictions, all activities took place outdoors.  Mahrukh gave a quick welcome and Thomas reminded the group of Covid protocols, explained the work planned for the day and gave a safety briefing.

Thanks to the rain over the past few months, the trees at CUE Haven have been flourishing, but so have the weeds!! The plan for the day was to catch up on the deferred spring maintenance work—removing weeds and trimming vegetation growing over the walking tracks and boardwalk.  We broke into three teams and each team tackled a different section of track. 

The teams went to work!  Alba and Omar led a team clearing the wetlands boardwalk.

And you are never too young to start volunteering…

The other teams worked on different sections of the walking track.

Thomas drove the groups out to the starting points and explained the work to be done.

Two trees that had fallen across the track and the team attacked them with saws and loppers to clear the way.

The teams did an amazing job clearing several of the tracks and they are looking great for the summer.

During the lockdown we had been working on building benches for the walking tracks, boardwalk and picnic areas, and we some of the team members helped us carry them out onto the tracks.  It was a challenging task because the benches are heavy and had to be carried quite a way down some of the tracks.

The first task was loading them onto the ute.

We drove out to the closest points along the tracks and unloaded the benches.

And tested them out!

Today’s objective was just to get the benches out to the field.  Future volunteers will level and position them in place.

The bench teams and the trimming teams all finished up at the same time and we spent time relaxing, catching up over lunch.

As always, it was so nice seeing Omar’s family and friends again. Our many thanks to Vanessa for organising the day.

And a BIG thank you to everyone in the team for once again coming out to help.  It is always great to see you all and we so enjoy the interesting conversation.  And we really appreciate all your hard work and efforts, and we continue to be very impressed with your enthusiasm and eagerness to help.

We look forward to seeing you all again soon for another fun and productive day.

THANK YOU!! THANK YOU!