Upon arriving at Etteh’s room for an interview, I was surprised to find a line of students stretching the length of the Up 4 hallway, then down the stairs and into the WestCo lounge, where the meandering line made a nice swirl pattern, then back up the stairs into Up 3. The students loitered casually, eagerly anticipating free furniture and clothing.
“You never know what you’re going to get,” said Eli Meixler ’13, now a regular customer. “Yesterday he gave me a tye-dye onesie.”
“I heard he has a blender,” speculated Ethan Hoffman ’12, who hopes that he will be able to make smoothies while doing yoga in the Community Service House living room.
After fighting my way through the 50-person bottleneck at Etteh’s door, I found him frantically handing his possessions to eager gift-seekers, barely able to satisfy the wild demand. “I don’t have much left,” he moaned, standing among his barren walls as a group of freshmen gutted the room of copper wiring. The only items left in the two remaining drawers of his desk were a bar of soap and some scattered notes for “20th-Century Franco-Caribbean Literature and the Search for Identity.”
“But I want to do whatever I can to help out,” he said, his genitals concealed only by a tactfully placed WesFest string bag. “These people need my belongings more than I do.”