What a weekend!
Yesterday was SJU National Community Day. Linda and I got up early to go to America's Second Harvest of Coastal Georgia. It was kind of sad not entering the SJU chapel seeing everyone in bright-colored t-shirts and hearing people complaining about being hung over, but I wore my "...With and for others" t-shirt with pride yesterday.
Linda and I, along with almost 100 other people, stuffed 15,000 grocery bags for elderly citizens of Savannah. It was fun, and we especially enjoyed making fun of how long it took some people to catch on to the assembly line system. I was initially sad that none of the Hawks living within 50 miles of Savannah responded to my email saying that they wanted to participate with me, but one man (who got his Master's at St. Joseph's College in 1961!) ended up mailing me a $300 check as a donation to Second Harvest, and he and his wife are taking me out to Thai food for lunch in two weeks!
Random important fact that I learned yesterday: Approximately 30% of food in the United States gets wasted. (Second Harvest works by getting surplus food from local grocery stores and re-distributing it as free or very low cost to those in need. In fact, Linda uses Second Harvest regularly for her clients at the community center where she serves.)
Today was an adventure. Linda, Regina, and I went to Fort Pulaski on Tybee Island. We walked to the furthest point of the fort, which is about a 1.5 miles from the parking lot, and then waded our way through the water to the Cockspur Lighthouse, which was about 45 yards away. We prepared by buying $5 tennis shoes at Walmart last night, which was definitely a good idea because the mud and oyster shells destroyed them almost instantly. (Entering the fort was free today because it's National Parks Week or something...so the $5 would've gone to our admission otherwise.) We also timed the trip perfectly by figuring out when low tide was; at high tide, the trip would have been almost impossible. The only glitch in our adventure was that I tried to walk along the sand, instead of on the shells, and ended up being knee-deep in the mud and unable to move before I even realized what was happening. Luckily, Linda and Regina pulled me out before I panicked, and now I have awesome battle scars up my legs! The water and weather were absolutely perfect, and we were pleasantly surprised that the water only went mid-way up our thighs. Climbing the lighthouse was kind of scary since most of the bricks on the stairs had eroded, but we made it to the top and got a beautiful view of the islands. And we even signed the visitors log to prove we did it! The best part was that we didn't see any alligators or sharks, which we were all petrified of (instead we saw lots of crabs and dead jellyfish).
I'm thinking of leaving my muddy shoes in my closet when I leave Savannah with a note telling future volunteers that they definitely need to make the trek to Cockspur!
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