For the Love of Socks

Man, I've been lazy blogging lately.... which means nothing out of the unusual. I have so much I want to blog about, though. It'll come.

I recently got back in touch through Facebook with an old friend of mine, LaDawn Park, from Spokane, and we were able to get caught up on what's happened since I was there as a missionary seven years ago. While I've been fooling around wondering what I'm going to study, and finally settling on geology, she's gotten two degrees and is nearly done with a Master of Social Work degree from BYU.

There are two reasons I'm bringing this up. First, I'm so glad I gave in and signed up for Facebook, because it's been a real lifeline working out here by myself. Second, I want to share a project LaDawn has been working on. She is working with several orphanages in Ukraine to bring clothing to orphan children who can't afford it. Apparently the kids there are lucky to get one or two new pair of socks each year, and her goal is to give each of the 300 orphans she's working with a six-pack of socks, which means she is trying to collect about 2000 pair of socks total. She has a brief post about it here on her blog, and is taking donations of new socks. Whatever cheap socks can be found are best, since the idea here is quantity more than anything else. Only about four people ever read this blog, so I have no idea if this tiny bit of publicity will have any effect, but it's worth a shot, and at the least I just wanted to share it. If anyone does happen to want to donate a couple dozen pair of socks, or even just a six-pack, the best thing to do is comment here or on LaDawn's blog; we're both set up to get email updates when comments are left, and something can be worked out to get the socks to BYU.

EDIT: I posted a video LaDawn made that was the Ukrainian orphan kids to "Prayer of the Children" by Inside Out, but I didn't realize she had it set to private to not over-expose the children in the video. I thought it would still work embedded in the blog, but apparently not. So, I've taken the video off the blog, which is too bad, because it's pretty effective.