I am humbled and grateful.

Thank you.

Yesterday Johnny and I talked about the really huge fee that Emirates assessed on the HFC items I was transporting to Uganda.

United is my frequent Airline and as a 1K I get loads of perks.  Its why I flew the first leg of my journey via United, all our luggage was free.  The flight was free as well using points.

Connecting via Dubai meant I would move over to Emirates.  I looked their excess baggage fees up online and figured it would be several hundred dollars.  After all luggage was tallied, the cost was $2600 (odd number for a hacker right?)  Then on the way to the plane I had to weigh my cabin luggage, that has never happened to me before and let me tell you I have flown a bunch.

I looked around and saw a huge yellow dumpster for you to throw away your overweight items.  That's right, they have this weight problem so often that they know you will pay or throw away.

Now I am not the average person going through there and did have an expectation of fees.  I was prepared to pay and we had expected it to hurt a bit.

Johnny posted about the fees on his blog and asked for a rally of donations.  I have caught that before, the Hacker Space A/C, Parts for various things, I jumped to action when I could.  I was shocked that 5 minutes after the blog post went out donations started coming in.  So and So from Atlanta, such and such from the Netherlands and on and on.  Then it happened.  A single donor wrote away the problem.

This gives us a problem.  We now have more than we need.  My thoughts are this, we can take the overage and get it into the hands of the HFC and use it for the upcoming VEX Robotics stuff.  It was something my 10 year old wanted to help with and started a lemonade stand to help out.  That or help with the 3d printed hands that Johnny is working so hard toward.

We are a community, we all help each other and today I am more aware of that than ever.  Thank You to all that jumped in.  Thank you to anyone that read the post and felt it wasn't right.  Thank you to my community of curious folks that want the world to be better.  Thank you.