Students to send Thanksgiving overseas

You may have seen the words "Support our troops" plastered on bumper stickers, but some Furman students have taken this slogan to heart and started a campus-wide service project that is giving members of the Furman community the opportunity to support America's soldiers overseas.The service club Xi Theta Xi is spearheading Thanksgiving Treats for the Troops, a campaign to put together care packages for soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The packages are comprised of "stuff that you can get in America that's very common but is probably very hard for [soldiers] to obtain overseas and is not provided by the Army," said XTX president and senior Christiana Bartlett.

The Furman response so far to Thanksgiving Treats for the Troops has been encouraging. Student groups such as Conservative Students for a Better Tomorrow, Phi Mu Alpha and Sigma Alpha Iota have become involved in creating care packages for the soldiers, while the Furman athletic department is trying to track down Furman alumni who are serving in the military.

XTX will be shipping the care packages to a non-profit organization called Soldiers' Angels, which will then send them overseas to the soldiers. This group was founded by the mother of a deployed soldier in 2004 after she found out that not everyone in her son's unit received support from home.

Junior Amy Sosinksi, the XTX secretary, discovered Soldiers' Angels during her freshman year at Furman. She decided to adopt a soldier for a year and corresponded with her soldier via e-mail. "[Adopting a soldier] was a really good experience, and I wanted to open that experience up to Furman students as well," said Sosinksi, who brought the idea to the group.

XTX itself has only been an official organization on campus since 2008. There are about sixty members in XTX who collectively log approximately two hundred hours of community service a week. The group is structured so that members can recommend any type of community service.

Other XTX community service endeavors include tutoring children, helping with pet therapy and volunteering at Safe Harbor, a local center for victims of domestic violence.

Items that are acceptable for care packages include toiletries and non-perishable snack foods like beef jerky. Items in pressurized cans as well as anything that is prone to leaking or melting should not be donated.

Drop boxes for donations of individual items for the care packages are available downstairs in the University Center by the Furman University Post Office and near the personal mailbox area. Anyone interested in donating entire care package boxes should arrange to drop them off with Sosinski.

Students also have the option of writing letters or cards of encouragement for the servicemen and servicewomen. They can be submitted unsealed to Sosinki at Furman mailbox number 29537. Contributions will be accepted through Oct. 30, 2009.