December 5, 2009

Many boxes of donations were delivered late last night. I was very surprised of the sizes of some of the boxes. These boxes were unusually big.

The postage label read that each box weighed about 70 lbs and paid about $50 for shipping. Wow… That is amazing. I searched for the name of who sent the package and it read ‘Hope Senterfitt.’ Ahh… It was from Hope!!! She and I interact with email quite often. She is an amazing lady.

In one of Hope’s emails, I read that she spent around $5,000 for shipping alone to send donations to different places to help people. She sends these donations to many places in the world, such as Afghanistan and Africa.

I am not sure how she collects all these donations, but when she does, she does not just send them as is. She washes them all. She washes clothes, shoes….. etc. She didn’t just send one or two pairs, but 134 pairs of shoes, all washed. They looked very clean. As the matter of fact, many looked brand new!! Thank you so much Hope!!! =)

Dr. Rafi was on leave, so Asad and I opened the boxes. While we went through the boxes, we found several notes inside the shoes.

These are the notes. “Picture please!” “William, you can put this one in the garbage. It does not look good.” “Sorry, William, about these mattress bags I usually wipe them down, but I am working at night and do not have time to wipe them off. It will rain by the morning. I am working all night.” “Inside does not look great, but the leather and the sole still in great shape. Sorry, William.” “Ray TOLD ME TO put this pair of tennis shoes in the garbage. You can. The top is good. The sole needs to be glued.” “These shoes need some glue in the sole.” “I am sorry shoes need to be washed.”

That is pretty impressing, isn’t it? She cared so much that she washed and dried all the shoes and clothes which took her all night after work and night classes. She even wrote notes on many shoes. She is just an amazingly compassionate woman. I am just lucky that she decided to support us. =)

She requested to make signs for a few people, so I made a sign and asked Asad to hold them. We do not have good markers or big poster sized papers, so we used what we could, and I hope it is okay with her. She mentioned that these two individuals are her two biggest supporters. Asad and I wanted to thank Hope, too, so we made a ‘Thank you, Hope’ sign as well. =)

Thank you, Hope!!!

We also received lots of boxes from Spirit of America. This is another amazing non-profit organization. I mainly worked with Mrs. Natasha Norman. She had me submit an article about my non-profit effort, and in a few days, she turned that into 2 full web pages to promote ‘Project Shoes-N-Clothes for Afghan Children,’ and ‘Project Afghan Literacy.’ I was thrilled to see how effectively they worked. Thanks Natasha! Thanks Spirit of America!!!