One more sleep until this is all over! I’m excited, but also sad that its ending. We achieved our goal officially today though, so everyone here is exstatic and sooo thankful for all the donations we’ve gotten! Tonight was pretty fun, I was minding my own business trying to study for my test on Saturday and doing pretty well, when out of nowhere the boys pulled me out of my deep study and threw me into the snow. A brief snowball fight followed, but in the end I won and we all regretted getting soaked before bed!
It’s sad to go back to real life, and the worst is knowing that its not over for the actual homeless people of the world. I am really glad I took part in this campaign, but I just wish we could do more.
As we’ve seen all week, food donations for us and things to keep us warm in this weather have been pouring in. On a side note I am officially keeping count on how many roll up the rim large green tea’s I have won and lost on. So far im 2/a million, but theres still two days and thats time for a whole bunch of wins in a row (I’m following the strategy of the Maple leafs in their quest for the playoffs).
Anyways! We’ve had our best day in donations so far, almost $1700 just today and most of it came directly from students and staff. And we all had a much better sleep, we tried to vote Scott off the cardboard to ease our issues with his loud snoring, and he refused but moving him to the outside of the sleeping arrangement worked and I actually got a solid 5 hours of sleep and woke up feeling totally refreshed!
One big thing I realized today about being homeless is how much harder it makes even the little things. I have a test on Saturday, it’s in one of my favorite classes and I generally don’t mind studying for it. But being ”homeless” makes it so much harder to get the motivation to do anything. Even today we needed to clean our cardboard area and I had to take a nap first. I guess I can think applying this to real life when people say “homeless people need to get a job, and get themselves going, get an education, get off the streets and pull themselves out of their slump,” they really don’t know how impossible it is. Cleaning yourself up alone is a huge task without a shower, blowdryer and somewhere to put yourself together. I definitly don’t know the solution to homelessness, but support definitly helps. Having friends, family and people you don’t even know come to visit you is so key and real homeless people rely on the shelters and places we’re giving to for these things. Bottom line is, it is a lot harder than I thought it would be, and we aren’t even facing half of the challenges real homeless people face. I don’t know how they do it, and I hope this campaign inspires a lot more compassion in people who think homeless people should get a job.
After a night on no sleep (caused by a combination of -12 weather and Scott’s vaccuum-like snoaring) I was feeling pretty weak in the morning but that changed as soon as we woke up and the donations started flowing. The day flew by as the weather was a bit warmer than we were used to and we had more local media out to support us which we always really enjoy. We aired on the evening news and got an awesome repsonse from people who didn’t even know us from all over the city coming to drop off blankets, cloths, money and food for our charities. It was really inspiring and made the cold sleepless night worth it!
The first day went really well here at McMaster. We had a tonne of generous donations from students and friends and a lot of media coverage. We raised 780 in our first day and we expect the awareness to help with the rest! Hope everythings going well at other schools! Our only real trouble was sleeping, the cold really put into perspective how hard this is going to be and more importantly how unimagineably hard it must be to actually be homeless. Until tomorrow!
