AFAC

The Arlington Food Assistance Center is the food pantry for Arlington county. It provides supplemental groceries to Arlington county residents that can't afford all the food they need. According to their web site (http://www.afacinfo.org/index.html):

"In our Fiscal Year 2007 (7/1/2006– 6/30/2007) we served 31,672 families and distributed 897,055 pounds of food. Volunteers donated 14,750 hours of time."

I have had the pleasure of volunteering with some of the folks at AFAC and they're all really sharp and really kind people. A few weeks ago Kelly and I dropped off some surplus Easter baskets to AFAC. Kelly's company had done an Easter basket charity thing and they had some 25 baskets without a home. I called my friendly AFAC contact, Joe, and asked her if the could use the extra baskets. They surely could so Kelly dropped them off and for the next two days I got emails from Joe thanking us for thinking of AFAC. A few weeks later we got a thank you letter from the executive director of AFAC. It was a nice feeling. Giving usually is.

As a result I was in contact with Joe at just the right time to discover that April is Feinstein challenge month. The way the challenge works is that Mr. Feinstein puts up $1 million as a challenge and up to that $1 million he matches all cash donations dollar for dollar and he matches food donations, 1lb of food = $1. So, Kelly in her role as member of the Club NII Charity Foundation, recommended AFAC be Club NII's April charity. And thus the giving commenced.

For the past few days Kelly has been bringing bags of food home from work. The living room looks like a Harris Teeter. The donations had to be made by Friday so we can get everything to AFAC by the 30th. So last night we had all the contributions piled up in the living room and Kelly did a tally of items. She took the paper with all the stats on it to work so she could inform everyone of just how generous they had been, so all I really remember is that there were 24 boxes of cereal, 21 boxes of pasta, 10 cans of canned meat, several jars of pasta sauce, 4 jars of PB and 4 jars of J, and countless other items. And then there was $700 in cash donations.

The food drive is over so I am not rambling on about this b/c I am soliciting yet another can of tuna. Rather I wanted to share this with you b/c last night when I was watching Kelly count through this giant bounty of food stuffs I was struck with a feeling of joyous relief. Relief that there are good people out there, doing good things just b/c they need to get done. Too often all we hear about are bad people doing bad things (FREAKSHOW in Austria, for example). Apparantly, not only do we have innumerable problems, a lot of of them are seemingly insurmountable, mostly b/c, apparently, the average human is bad and doing bad things.

This of course isn't true, it only feels true sometimes. The truth is less grim. There are good people out there doing good things, see . . . .



In case you ARE wondering, I'll get the total tally from Kelly tonight.