Halfway to the Moon!

Esther Bryan

The Quilt has travelled many a mile, and here we are in the 15th year, getting ready for more big milestones, the launch of the Documentary and the Youth Quilt, and the 32nd exhibit of theQuilt, all at the NAV Conference Centre in Cornwall, April 19- 21.

For the past year we’ve been working hard on a 42- minute documentary recounting the storyQuilt of Belonging. The film crew and I have travelled many a mile, filming and conducting interviews. Recently, doing research for the production, I did some digging to “get the facts”. For example, how many hours did the volunteers give in the 6 ½ years it took to make the Quilt? And what distance did we travel to get the job done?

I meticulously did the calculations, erring on the side of caution. Could it really be? Was it possible? I recalculated twice, then three times. Yes, the volunteers did spend more than 46,000 hours making the Quilt and they had travelled more than 215,000 kilometres– the distance ofmore than 5 times around the earth or —more than halfway to the moon!