LYNN — Nine-year-old Samantha Parker has gotten a taste of philanthropy, and she likes it.
When the fourth-grader was told by her teacher that the Shoemaker School was looking for blankets, coats, toys and toiletries to send to New Jersey victims of Hurricane Sandy, she jumped at the chance to help. Her mother, Lisa Parker, said her daughter came home from school and typed a letter asking for donations and hand-delivered it to 14 houses in her Martin Road neighborhood.
“She did it all by herself,” said Lisa Parker. “I was so amazed. She felt so good about it.”
Samantha Parker said she had heard about the struggles of the storm victims on the news and from her friends who had family in New Jersey.
“I just wanted to do something good and help them because I feel like we are just here with everything that we have and they have nothing,” she said Monday.
Samantha Parker said she “waited in the window for all the donations” to come from her neighbors who had wanted a chance to donate to the victims. Two days later, Samantha Parker had picked up 10 bags with coats, blankets, toothbrushes, toothpaste, nail files and stuffed bears, filling up the back of her mother’s truck. She said every time a bag was brought to the door, “I would start jumping up and down and my dad would say, ‘She’s very excited.’ ”
Samantha and her mother brought the items to the friend of a Shoemaker teacher who was driving to New Jersey and volunteered to make a delivery.
Samantha Parker said her favorite part of donating were the notes that her neighbors left for her that said, “You did a great job and I’m so proud of you.”
She added that she doesn’t know if she brought the most amount of donations for the victims, but she is happy she was able to help. “It makes me feel like I did something big in the world,” she said.
In an email Monday, Samantha Parker’s grandmother, Betty Emerson, wrote, “Thanks to the quick thinking of a child, more victims will be helped.”
Kait Taylor can be reached at [email protected].
