I Took My Charity To The Street

Last Saturday we held another charity event. After a week of preparation, we were ready to visit and help out the less fortunate again.

I will write the article as if it was written on the same day so the story will flow a little bit better.

Today we have 3 places to visit. First stop is the Ancol area (North Jakarta) in a neighborhood where the “pemulung” (people who go through garbage to find recyclable items they can sell) live. We pledged 70 packages of food to them. And then we will do a “Drive-N-Drop” around poor neighborhood and find people on the street to donate the package to. We loaded about 100+ packages in 3 cars. The plan is to do the drop at Ancol first, and then come back and get some more packages for the “Drive-N-Drop”.

We were supposed to meet at 11.30 am at my place and as predicted … everyone is late, except me of course. Anyway, the traffic around Ancol was really bad. I was in the last car of the convoy. Due to poor communication in bad traffic, we missed a turn. Turning around was not an option because the traffic on the other side of the road was not moving. It will probably set us back at least an hour. So I decided to skip this stop (the other 2 cars were already there so I will let them take care of that), and proceeded with the ‘Drive-N-Drop’.

I have to say the ‘Drive-N-Drop’ was a bit weird. We drove around for a bit and when we see someone who we feel can use the help, we will stop the car; either get out of the car to give them the package or we just pass the package to them through the window. There was this older gentleman who wasn’t sure whether to accept our giveaway because he couldn’t see what was in the bag. In all, we gave away about 30 packages (short of our initial target of 50). This drop wasn’t planned so we had to do with what we had in the car.

Julie did most of the drop. Danny has to drive, I have to take pictures, and Hui has to pass the packages to Julie. It was an excellent teamwork.

I created the following video for the ‘Drive-N-Drop’. Amateur work. Hope you enjoy it.