I am finding it ironic that here I am writing about ways to help the less fortunate and yet due to the flu two things we were planning to do, Becky's canned food drive and now Sean's helping with our parish's annual Thanksgiving Clothing Drive, didn't happen. He was supposed to help out this weekend as part of his Confirmation spirit team. However, he suddenly started running a fever again. Right now he's seems fine though (well except for the sore throat and stuffy head cold bit.)
I wanted to have a nice shot of Sean helping sort through the mounds of clothes that get collected for our Thanksgiving Clothing Drive. It is the brainchild of one of our parishioners who has been doing it for 20 years or so. He organizes the whole thing and it has become an annual event not only in our parish but in the community as well.
People can't deliver the clothing until Friday morning. Volunteers at the church set up tables all up and down the huge activity center. The tables in the center are the sorting tables; the long row of tables to the left and right are all labeled with types and sizes of clothing. One table will be infant - 3 clothing; another Mens winter clothing; another Women's summer clothing, etc. The job of the volunteers is to receive the clothing dropped off, dump the bags on to the sorting tables and then work through the clothes placing them on the proper tables. When the table is full to overflowing the sorted garments get put into big green industrial strength/size plastic bags which are labeled with the content. This goes on all Friday and Saturday and Sunday morning until 12:00 p.m. At 12:00 on the dot the doors close and no more donations will be accepted. The guy who runs things is very strict about this bit because in the past people would show up late or even the next day with donations and expect him to handle it. But he's already delivered the donations via the trucks he rents. He spends the rest of the day making sure the donations get to the right places and that's quite a bit of driving to do all over the metropolitan area on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. So if you are late, you have to take it to Good Will yourself. He rents a couple of those big Penske trucks and they get all filled up too.
In other years when we've volunteered, sometimes people will wander in. I don't know how because the church is located in the middle of suburbia and there isn't even a bus that runs close to it. But the word must spread and someone must give these folks a lift. Anyway, occasionally you'll see a shy Hispanic family or maybe some other people come in and they are in need of clothing. So sometimes the middle man, meaning the particular homeless shelter or community clothes closet, is bypassed and we can give the things needed directly to those in need.
Usually, this is when I do a huge closet purge of outgrown clothing, clothing that nobody really wears and that sort of thing. This year though I didn't do a very good job at it. We only had three smallish bags of things to contribute. I am sure I could have come up with more but frankly I'm recovering from the flu too and don't have too much energy. Also, the other things had pretty much already been collected before we got sick. I don't really want to breathe on the clothing and then hand it over to others to contaminate!
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