Adopt A Family

Saturday, December 4 – Today was the first day of my participation in the Adopt A Family program that I signed up for this December. The purpose of the program is to help low income families afford Christmas by buying presents for their children. Each person is assigned a family and is given a list of the children and what they want for Christmas. We were given a family with two young boys whose favorite colors were red and blue, and who were interested in bugs and cars. We tried to start the shopping today for the kids but we didn’t find much. We did find a coloring book with a few bugs in it and some toy cars but we still needed to get cloths and a few more toys for the kids.

Sunday, December 5 – Today we were able to find a lot more of the toys the kids wanted and all for reasonable prices. We got the first boy a Creepy Crawlers Creation Laboratory that lets him create bugs from a Joelton like mix. We also got him a pack of giant crayons so he can color in the bug book we got him. We got the second kid a Tomas the train set that runs on batteries and a kid’s book about different kinds of cars and their engines. For clothes we got the first kid three shirts, three pants, a red winter jacket and gloves set, and some red Spider Man pajamas. And for the second kid we got three shirts, two pants, a blue jacket with matching gloves and a hat, and Cars pajamas. We were successful in getting everything on the list.

Saturday, December 11 – Today I was at the building where all the toys from all the people who volunteer for the program come and get sorted into their different families. In addition to volunteering for the program I also volunteered to help with the sorting. My job is look through all the items that are sent in and match them with their families while also checking to make sure there are no excess items in the bags people send in. Today was just for setting up the stations in the building for the sorting and not to do any of the actual sorting yet. We set up tables in a room for all the excess toys and we got bags to fill for all the toys that would go to the families. Then we sorted out the forms of all the families in alphabetical order to make sure everything would be set to start the sorting on Monday.

Monday, December 13 – Today was to be the first day of sorting but before that could start we had to bring all the bags of toys people had donated down stairs to the sorting room. There were a lot of bags and took a very long time because some of them were very heavy and needed two people to lift them. We lined the bags up in the hallway outside the sorting room and made sure they were all numbered correctly to correspond with the number their families were given. This took so long that we did not have enough time to start the sorting and we waited until next time.

Saturday, December 18 – Today we started sorting. I was taught by my adult supervisor
what to do. You would take the form of one of the families and on it would be a list of the children in the family and what they wanted for Christmas. Then you would take the bag that was labeled with the same number as the family had and see if the items in the bag matched the items on the list. If there was anything extra you had to put it on the extra’s table. If there was anything missing you would look on the extra’s table and try and find something that was similar to it to put in the bag for the family in place of the missing item. Then you had to check everything off on the list and write in anything extra that you added. This is all I did today as a start and I finished a lot of bags and felt good that I was doing it for such a good cause. I did the best I could to make sure every kid got what they wanted for Christmas or at least something like it.

Sunday, December 19 – Today I learned how to organize the bags into the different storage trucks to wait until the families came to pick them up. There were three different trucks with different purposes. Because there over 100 bags, two of the trucks were used as storage trucks for the bags that already had everything in them and were all set to be picked up. One of these trucks was to store bags 1-80 and the other truck was to store the rest of the bags. The third truck was for bags that were not completed yet. In other words, if a bag being sorted had a missing item and none of the extra items could substitute it, it would go into this truck until an extra arrived that was suitable for replacing the missing item. There were three lists as well for each truck and after a bag was stored it had to e recorded on the list that represented that truck. I did this for most of the day along with sorting some more bags.

Monday, December 20 – Today was the last day for me to help with the Adopt A Family program. I spent the day sorting out bags and storing them in their respective trucks. Today I combined these two activities and once I was done sorting a bag I immediately put it into the truck it belonged to. After all the bags were done being sorted I went to the third truck and took out all the bags that were not yet complete and went around to the extra’s table to look for items that could replace the missing items for the bags. I was able to find an item for each bag and afterward I put the bags into the two finished trucks. Then the families came and gathered the bags that were marked for their kids and I checked them off the list. This program made me aware of some of the serious issues of low income and even homelessness not only on the Cape but the world as well. I was glad to help with this issue a little bit, though I wish I could have done more.