GISHWHES - Wrap Up

Sunday, GISHWHES wrapped up. As a first-time participant in GISHWHEs, I really wasn't sure what to expect. I knew that there would be a list of a number of very strange items that I would be working with fourteen other people across the globe to collect. I knew that it would push me out of my comfort zone to work on these items with people I had never met before.
 
What I wasn't expecting was the amazing sense of community that arose in only a week. A part of me knew (vaguely) about GISHWHES from last year and how people came together in order to complete certain tasks. I knew that if my team wanted any shot of winning, we would have to really come together and work together. I wasn't expecting other people within GISHWHES to be so amazing and supportive as well. I wasn't expecting so many people that had no idea what GISHWHES was to be willing to help.
 
And, in the midst of so many terrible things happening every day, it is amazing to see something like this happen. When there are kids out htere killing innocent people because, quite simply, they're bored, it is amazing to know that an entirely different group of people can come together to break the Guinness World Record for the largest online photo album of people hugging. Reading the news can really make you think the world is an awful place and that people are really just terrible. But then something like GISHWHES happens and CEO's of different companies are willing to make people smile by dancing to Single Ladies and random people across the internet are helping me raise over $400 in diapers in a matter of THREE days for the Genesis Women's Shelter and thousands of people spent time with a random stranger trying to cheer them up during dialysis treatment and people are going with friends to donate blood.
 
I know that the good does not cancel out the bad, but sometimes that isn't what we need. We need to just simply know that there is good in the world. That people are good.
 
And I think that is what GISHWHES is all about.
 
Well, that and taking pictures dressed as stormtroopers.