On May 4th 2018, Brian Borg and I delivered roughly 160 Star Wars Legends books to Phoenix Children’s Hospital. We wanted to share this short summary of the event.
After preparing the books and loading them into our milk crates, we left for the hospital and arrived with roughly an hour until the scheduled event. After we received our visitor passes we brought the books to a special recreation room with board games, an air hockey table, a T.V., and several other activities for the kids taking part in the event. There was also a counter set up that was going to be used for drawing, however the hospital allowed us to use a section of the counter to hand out the books, so we started unpacking and organizing the books we had.
We had barely emptied one crate when the hospital staff brought over a couple of Home Depot boxes filled with Kenner Star Wars action figures. He told us that they had been donated the week before and that they wanted us to give them to the kids along with one of the books we brought. We then spent about 30 minutes organizing the books and action figures in a way that displayed them all while taking up as little counter space as possible. During this time we briefly met with a few of the 501st members but didn’t get to speak with them for very long.
At 2:30 the kids started arriving and as we were fairly close to the door we were often the first thing they stopped at. The action figures were of course the big draw and Brian and I proceeded to help them in choosing which figure they wanted, after that we would bring them over to the books and help them choose one as well. Though obviously quite a few of them were less enthusiastic about the books then they were about the figures. The kids would usually then go on to enjoy the rec room, take photos with the 501st volunteers and play the games.
The common trend among the kids was that a lot of them either weren’t that big of Star Wars fans, or didn’t have a lot of preferences to what they liked about Star Wars. This of course added to the degree of difficulty of helping them figure out which books and action figures we would give them but we got through it. One of the 501st members came as Darth Vader and as there were two Vader action figures we got him to sign the boxes as Vader, another volunteer who came as Juno Eclipse did everything she could to convince the kids to take one of our copies of The Force Unleashed. There was also a volunteer who came as Kylo Ren and when he overheard that one of the kids liked Chewbacca he asked if we had the book where they dropped a moon on him. Actually, Chewbacca was probably the most popular answer when we asked who their favorite characters were. So, I guess we will need to bring more books featuring Chewbacca in the future. Let us know if you have any suggestions (And no not Vector Prime)
Volunteers from the 501st and those with the hospital expressed interest in the books we had as well. One of the hospital staff in particular asked us about Darth Bane Path of Destruction a couple of times, which was nice to see, and we answered all of their questions that we could without giving too much away.
At around 5 they closed down the recreation room. The books that we still had left which was around 130ish we left at the hospital to be added to their own library and go to the school they are attached to. Overall it was a great event, the kids had fun and we ended up passing out around 30 books to the patients and their siblings. Thank you to everyone who donated as this event simply would not have been possible without your support.
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