Broken, Not Beaten.
Yep, that pretty much describes where we are at.
If you’ve been following our story, you’ll know my family and I are on a mission to Transform Children’s Health, One Lunchbox At A Time, and we are taking this mission around Australia. Using my unique, fun and interactive Mad Food Science Program™, I am teaching children about healthy food choices in a fun way so they go home and start the conversation about healthy food with their parents. I then help parents to keep that conversation going so they start making changes to lunchboxes and what they eat at home. It happens! Parents tell us it’s working.
Now, if life went according to plans, our lives would be packed into our bus we’d converted to a motorhome, our kids would be doing distance education and we’d be on the road for 3 months by now. And I would be running my Mad Food Science Program for children as we travel around, transforming their health and their family’s health as we go.
But life hasn’t gone according to plan this year.
Well some of it has. We have sold up most of possessions, packed up our lives so it all fits into a trailer, taken the kids out of school, started distance education for our 8yo daughter and a home pre-school program for our 4yo son and moved out of our home of 9 years. The thing that’s missing from this picture is our bus – our home, school, office and mobile billboard for our mission. It’s supposedly been 3 weeks away from being finished since the start of the year.
We’ve been very fortunate to have amazing friends who allowed us to live in their holiday home for 5 weeks, and yesterday we moved in with my mum.
So our bus, where is it?
On Thursday (2 very long days ago), we found out we are in a long line of customers who are chasing the guy (Brett Smith of Stargazer Motorhome Conversions) converting our bus for incomplete work or money he has taken from them. On Thursday, he admitted to us he has no money, and he has used what we have paid him for paying wages, rent and living. He also admitted that he hasn’t purchased most of the equipment (solar panels, oven, fridge, washing machine, batteries etc) he had told us he had bought with our money.
We estimate we have lost about $40-$50,000 at this stage. It appears given the long line of people who are chasing him, we are his latest victims and probably have little chance of recovering this money. Devastated, gutted, furious, sad, emotional basket case – all describe how we were feeling on Thursday.
Despite feeling like our world had fallen apart, we had a date with Israel’s brother and wife to go see That Sugar Film on Thursday night. I am so glad we still went. It’s an incredible film- it was just what we needed to remind us why our mission is so important.
Yesterday we were broken, but we had to pick ourselves up and move on.
Yesterday we repacked our life back into our trailer and I towed this huge trailer that was supposed to be towed behind the bus, for 5 hours to my Mum’s. Just to put this in context – I only had lessons on how to tow this trailer a week ago and never before with my most precious cargo (hubby and my 2 cherubs) in the car. Why am I driving and not my hubby? That’s a whole other story – suffice to say he had an accident in late January and required major knee surgery so cannot drive.
So today, it’s Saturday. We’ve had 2 days for the news of our bus to sink in.
The short version is that we are still broken. But today we have resolved we are not beaten. Our mission is too important – That Sugar Film helped us realise this. Educating our children about real food and packaged food is the answer. We need to do this otherwise our children’s generation will have the fate that is currently being reported – escalating obesity, diabetes, and other chronic illness, and a shorter life expectancy than our generation. We remain firm on this. We can’t let this happen – not on our watch.
We’ve resolved to just move on. I have schools booked in for my Mad Food Science Program in April and May in NSW & QLD. In all likelihood, we will not have our bus sorted by then but we still have a huge trailer as our canvas that can be our mobile billboard. We will get this sign-written the way it was intended (see picture here), and tow that wherever we go. We can sort out accommodation as we head into each town. (We’ve had so many offers of support and accommodation already – which has us feeling quite humbled and extremely grateful.)
We haven’t worked out the next steps about our bus yet. We know we have lost a lot of money, but we also know we are too far in this to turn away. We sold our home because that bus was to become our home and a symbol of how strongly we feel about our mission. We will find a way to get that home on the road.
So our trip around Australia is starting somewhat differently than planned but we have our health, our smarts and most of all each other. Broken, Not Beaten.