GIVE BACK
Try giving a little of your time — you'll be surprised how much you can get in return.
From the book:
#10 Join A Relief Effort
“In 1999, when Tropical Storm Floyd hit, the Raritan River in New Jersey flooded, sending twelve feet of water down Main Street in the town of Bound Brook, a.k.a. the Floodiest Town in America. Two people drowned, thousands fled to shelters, homes and businesses were destroyed, and I watched it all on the news from my own (dry) home thirty-three miles away. It would have taken me forty to fifty minutes to drive down there the next day, week, or even month to help with the cleanup effort. Did I go? No.
In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit, I was on vacation with my family and didn’t even realize what had happened until three days after the fact. When I got home, I pulled out my credit card and donated money to relief efforts. Meanwhile, Lisa Walsh and her friends in Randolph, Massachusetts, were gathering donated clothes, baby wipes, and personal-hygiene products to drive down to a community center in Lafayette, Louisiana.
“I’m in recovery. There’s a bunch of women in the group who’ve been running together for a long time, and we wanted to do something,” says Walsh, who’s forty-two.
One of the women placed an ad in the local paper looking for donations, and soon her entire front lawn was covered with large garbage bags filled with supplies. “It blew up,” says Walsh. “People were just dying to do something, and nobody knew what to do in those first weeks.”
In addition to being in recovery together, Walsh and her friends are bikers (the name of their AA group is In the Wind). A number of them owned trailers for hauling motorcycles, but since Walsh and her husband are self-employed, they volunteered to make the drive. When they pulled out of town, there wasn’t an inch of space left in their cargo camper. And when they pulled into Lafayette two days later, they could barely comprehend what they had seen….”
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