Day 75

What a phenomenal (can I say ... Phenomenal) yep.. Phenomenal night!!

Organizing this event for the past 2 weeks was quite overwhelming! But after seeing the fruits of all of our efforts... Tonight had to be one of the most rewarding nights of my life.

Friends I haven't seen in months and years were there to volunteer tonight! Friends who hate to drive for longer than 20 minutes or past the city they live in, drove for hours to pick up food donations!

Thanks to a few other friends of ours we had pizza and chicken from Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, and Church's.

We'd all agreed to meet at SHO at around 5:30, but of course we were all running late! John was lost trying to get to Little Caesar's in Hamilton Mill and Raksha had to chase down the tin foil covering her chicken from Church's!!! Jiten (Kid) was the only one who'd been ready with the 25 pizza's we'd asked him to pick up. All we had by 5:30pm was a bunch of volunteers at safehouse with some sweet tea!

Miraculously, Raksha and I made it through the rush hour traffic. John came in soon after.

Our volunteers were machines! We filled the boxes up with pizza and chicken until we ran out! At which point Chandni and Kid ran out to get more chicken from Publix!

We continued packing, joking, laughing, and prepping for service for the next hour or so, all the while anxiously waiting to serve our clients!

Once service was over, we started to serve seconds was when the knots in our stomach finally loosened. We had enough. Everyone was served.

The band tonight was outstanding. There was group of kids spending their Spring Break at SHO in service of those less fortunate than themselves. Everyone was so helpful! And as usual, Chandni and I got to hang out with our faves!

It was wonderful to have people remember us from times before, well... me, anyway. Because Chandni's part of the SHO family now. And it was great to catch up with our clients!!

It was an AMAZING night, and we couldn't have done it without our amazing volunteers.

And with that, I'd like to give a special thanks to our vendors - Kamran Kurani @ Pizza Hut, Parvez Khoja @ Little Caesar's, and Alvin Shah @ Church's for all the food donations tonight!

I've never seen such diversity within a group of volunteers at SHO in my history of volunteering there (as short as it's been).

Thank you Hema, Jacyntha, Dyuti, Kenny, Kola, Patti, Rawle, John, Gaurav, Raksha, Lablanc, Jiten (Kid), and Chandni for everything tonight.

We could not have accomplished any of what we did tonight without you!!!

Thank you everyone!
Let's do this again!!!!!!!