My first big volunteer event after signing up for Tzu Chi certification was last Saturday. Jason SB picked me up at 8:40am and we drove over to Munya SG’s home in Sunnyvale for three hours of gift wrapping.
From what I discerned, this gift event happens twice a year: once before the first day of school, once before Christmas. It acts as way of motivating kids in East Palo Alto to study hard and stay in school. The gifts themselves consist of two shirts and a pair of shoes; our job was to beautify the rewards by placing them in nicer wrapping.
The ~25 volunteers got split into teams of four. All four gentlemen, including myself, got lumped together. The gift bagging + wrapping finished early and by 10:30am, the event morphed into a social.
There were a fair amount of people I knew at the event, including four ladies from Creekside farmers’ market and two ladies from the younger Tzu Chi crowd. The biggest name / face recognition that happened though, was later in the day when we were eating lunch.
Bernie (the son of Munya SG who stopped by later) and I were discussing growing up in the ‘Bay. After I revealed that I am Lynbrook ’08, he asked if I knew his cousins Sanders and Emily. I nodded and told him we were good friends growing up. Sanders’ intense reaction to Bernie’s selfie text of me and him livened the mood and made the rest of the conversations flow.
