Katrina comes close to home...

Sep 08, 2005 19:52

We're starting to be able to help up here in good 'ole Tennessee. As a Wal-Mart employee, all of our stores are collecting money nationwide, and some people are coming in to purchase things to send, but today was the day of all days. And I finally got to do something major to help the hurricane relief. What I'm pretty sure was First Baptist Church of Morristown came in our Wal-mart to spend, get this, $15,000. I was like wow. So we had this list and we all start putting stuff together. It takes us several hours to get everything together & rung up on an isolated register up front, and what looks like it has to be a decent amount of stuff barely touches $5000 dollars. So we start over. Loading stuff up and taking it up front, then taking them back to our receiving area and putting them on a truck. And from us the stuff's going to Grace Baptist, which I think is somewhere in Louisiana, somewhere that got hit the hardest by Katrina.

Supplies: Shampoo, soap, cleaning supplies, paper towels, toilet paper, and non-perishable food. Baby stuff, and then at that point anything we can think of that they can use. Today I worked 6 hours doing nothing but helping. Really made me feel like I was doing something close to being useful, so much more than just putting a dollar in some tin somewhere.

On the homefront some more, I want to try to organize a clothing drive on campus, where everyone brings in used clothing and we give it all to some local church to send to somewhere where people really need it. I was just sort of waiting around to see if it would come up that people need that sort of thing, but now I think i'm going to try contacting a local church and just doing it all myself. I dunno. If I see those people from First Baptist tomorrow I just might do that then. I think it'd be really useful, and I definitely want to help. I feel so sorry for all those people.

I probably should put some of this behind a cut...but I'm not gonna. The only other thing I've got to say is that we're going to be doing a panel discussion in my speech class in a few weeks, and hopefullly it'll be over something like the katrina response/relief effort or the iraq war. I'm the moderator of a group of six people, which means if they can talk about it on their own then my job's easy, but if they shut up then i have to make it all work again. But I'm excited. Anyway...gotsa go.

Peace :)

wal-mart, life

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