Every Tuesday for the next two months that we are here doing promotions for the scholarship we received, we will be in charge of collecting the clothes from all of the drop boxes and then taking them to the thrift store that buys them from us. Here is what the whole journey looks like:
Tuesday morning we leave by 7 am (we are going to try to leave by 6 because, as you will see below, its a LONG day and we want to finish earlier). We drive from our school to the GAIA warehouse in Chicago. From here we pick up the truck (pictures shown below, better ones to come after next week!) and the keys for all of the boxes and leave our van there. We then drive to Fort Wayne, Indiana and drive to, I believe, 28 locations where we have boxes and we empty the bags of clothes into our truck. A full box holds around 300 lbs. of clothes and at many of the sights we also have to pick up mattresses, couches, and even toilets that people leave there. We obviously can't use these but we have to take them with us and empty them into the dumpsters so we can keep the area looking clean.
After hitting all of the sights, we stay the night in a Motel 6 who we have a relationship with and who has agreed to give us a special rate of $35 a night. The next morning we get up and drive to Merriville Indiana, where we unload the bags of clothes into "skids", big cart things on wheels, at the second hand clothes store there. They weigh each skid and GAIA gets paid per pound of clothes. From here we have to drive back to Chicago to empty all of the trash we collected along the way and to return the truck. Then we take our van and drive back to the school.
This past Tuesday was our first run and we ended up leaving the school at 7:30 in the morning and didn't get into our room until 8:30 that night, and we didn't get back to the school until around 5:30 Wednesday evening so its a pretty long two days of work. It was pretty fun though and very satisfying. Its hard work throwing bag after bag into the truck and cleaning, etc. To give you an idea of how many bags of clothes we collect, this last trip our total weight was 4,800 lbs.
It was great to put in a good days worth of hard work, knowing it was for a good thing. The money that comes from this helps to keep the school running because the tuition we pay is so low and doesn't cover everything, and it also supports GAIA which works on sustainability in impoverished countries.
This time, because we had never done it before, Anthony came with us. It was really great to have someone sort of show us the ropes and all of the driving gave us a great opportunity to have some awesome conversations about the world, and about the organization and all of the work it does and the obstacles it has had/has to overcome.
It was a very successful trip and I think we are both excited to do it again next week!
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