I want to take a moment here to thank everyone who contributed to the GoFundMe that I put up at the beginning of this year to buy a trailer for my homeless friend Thomas, who has been living in a tent for the last year.
Competition for small travel trailers right now is absolutely insane and what we thought was just going to take us a couple of weeks ended up taking five months. By the end we were literally dropping everything and jumping in the van within minutes of a possible candidate being posted on craigslist just to have a chance at buying it. We saw plenty of tired water damaged trailers but I always just asked myself if I would live in it and if the answer was no we kept looking. In the end we managed to land a 2008, 16 foot trailer with all appliances working and no leaks. Liz, myself, and Thomas are all incredibly appreciative for the full funding of our goal because without it we wouldn’t have had a chance to get anything decent.
As a solar enthusiast from way back I was able to piece together a simple solar battery charging system for lights and small devices from a dusty old 100 watt panel and various bits and bobbles from the recesses of my electrical bins. This was really fun and reminded me how much I miss building off grid systems both big and small.
Whether you contributed $20 or $1000 (we had several of those, thank you), today Thomas has a safe, clean place to live that will hopefully help to restore a sense of dignity which is so crucial when you’ve been through hard times. Thank you everyone who donated, and if you’d still like to help out I’m going to leave the fundraiser up for a few more weeks to see if we can get a little bit of money for garbage service, plug in electricity, and propane. You can find it by searching “A Trailer for Thomas” on GoFundMe.
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