The phrase “adopting a solider” is not what it looks like. You’re obviously not physically adopting a solider, but a nonprofit organization called “adoptaplatoon” encourages people to sign up to either be a “pen pal” for a solider, or “adopt” one.

Let me explain futher. When you’re a “pen pal”, you obviously have to write letters to your assigned solider. These letters have to be sent every week, and a majority of the time you don’t get a response because the soliders are working hard and have very little time to do other activities. Although you may not get a response, soldiers absolutely LOVE getting letters. It makes them remember exactly what they’re fighting for. They may be feeling lonely, stressed, out of place, etc, and receiving a letter is a great way to rid them of these negative emotions. You can talk about your life, ask them questions about theirs, and develop a really nice connection with them. They also assign you soldiers that are around your age so you don’t feel “creeped” out or anything of that sort. Writing to soldiers is an amazing thing because they may not have any family and you are literally their only connection outside of the war.

If you “adopt” a solider, not only do you write them letters every week, but you are obligated to send them care packages every month. The solider can write to you and tell you exactly what things he may want or need, or you can just send cute or comforting things that you think he might like. Maybe his favorite cookies, a movie or tv series he might love, a new toothbrush, etc. I can’t stress how much they adore getting packages. You can even pack enough of a certain item so that they can share it with their comrades, mainly so they don’t get jealous :]

If you are interesting in being a pen pal or adopting a solider, you can sign up at http://adoptaplatoon.org/site/! I really encourage this! Please consider it. 🙂

So you all definitely know what THON is (hopefully), so I won’t bother explaining it too thoroughly. THON is Penn State’s 46 Hour Dance Marathon for Pediatric Cancer and it is the largest student run philanthropy in the world. No child should have to go through the pain and suffering of having cancer, so the goal of THON is to raise money to ease their pain by providing the best medical care possible, help families with their obnoxious medical bills, and to give them support. There are many ways in which to raise money for THON, but the most popular by far is “canning”. When someone “cans” it means they go out into the streets equipped with cans and harass cars and people to donate money. Not only is it a great way to raise funds, it’s also a way to spread knowledge about Penn State’s goal to eliminate pediatric cancer

The process of canning starts off with organizations getting together to create groups of maybe 10-20+ people each to go on this adventure. One person in a group volunteers to be the “host”, which means everyone in the group stays at that persons home for the entire weekend. A bonus to staying in someone else’s house is that their parents usually make a home cooked meal for dinner, and it’s free! College kids love free food, especially if it’s home cooked. A few other people volunteer to be the “drivers” and obviously drive everyone in the group to their hosts’s home. This can be tedious because some people’s homes are 5-6 hours away. Even though it’s far, it’s a great opportunity to widen our horizons and spread knowledge of THON. After everyone gets to their destination, they go out on the streets and beg people for donations.

Everyone plays a part of THON including fraternities, sororities, athletics, clubs, and specific THON organizations. I mentioned before that my organization is called FOTO. We are only about 200-250 people, but we raise a lot of money. Last canning weekend we raised over $16,000. Other groups such as Atlas raised over $109,000 last canning weekend, but they have about 5 times the amount of people. THON really gets everyone involved in Penn State and brings us together for one specific goal, to cure pediatric cancer.

So I mentioned in one of my earlier posts about a club I’m involved with called Go Change Move and how we wanted to do a dream board. Well, we did it! Some of you probably saw it outside of the HUB today actually. It was extremely successful and rewarding and I’m gleaming with joy. For those of you who don’t know what a dream board is, it’s basically a giant chalkboard that has “Before I die…” written on it and everyone and anyone can come and write what their goals and aspirations are before they pass. The fun part about a dream board is besides writing your own goal, you can see everyone else’s. It’s really amazing what some people hope to do and it gives you an insight into their personalities. Our dream board was pretty small compared to some others, but it was definitely just as effective. We got our inspiration from a woman named Candy Chang. She did a TED Talk on a dream board that she did herself. She lives in New Orleans and there’s dozens of abandoned houses and buildings in her area. They are usually the target of graffiti, so she wanted to make the buildings into something useful and productive to society. She covered the entire building in chalkboards and wrote “Before I die” really large in the upper left hand corner and then wrote “I want to ____” over and over so that people could fill in the blank with whatever they choose. Some of the responses were really inspirational such as “I want to live”, “I want to cure cancer”, “I want to see my mom one last time”, etc, and some of them were silly like “I want to kiss a shark”, “I want to live on the edge”, “I want to marry James Aldean”, and things like that. This was an amazing experience and I hope to be apart of it again soon. If you’d like to see Candy’s amazing TED Talk that inspired us here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uebxlIrosiM. So what do you want to do before you die? What are you waiting for?

Dream Board in progress…

Finished Product!