S4BW's Halloween canned food drive yielded these items, which accounted for the vast majority of Uni's contributions to the 2008 Food for Families campaign. Gargoyle photo by David Porreca (click to enlarge)

ON HALLOWEEN, 16 UNI students, including myself, stood in an empty parking lot in the Hessel Park area of Champaign at 6 p.m., shivering against the cold evening breeze and wishing we had worn heavier coats over our costumes.

A pile of cardboard boxes stood off to one side, temporarily ignored as we examined our carefully planned maps, the roads we were supposed to cover highlighted in pink. A train of four vans idled on the street nearby.

Though this scene may already sound odd, it quickly disintegrated into groups of four, each piling into a van, carrying one or two of the cardboard boxes.

The groups went their separate ways, and I watched out the back window as two of the four performed U-turns or turned into driveways to change directions, already confused as to what they were supposed to be doing, or where they were going.

Oh boy, I thought. It's going to be a long night.

Despite the initial disorganization, we were actually part of Students for a Better World's second annual Halloween Hunger Drive, on a mission to collect cans for the Eastern Illinois Foodbank's Food for Families campaign.

Organized by S4BW president Rachel Hyman, the Halloween drive was intended to collect nonperishables to be redistributed to food pantries and soup kitchens across the area.

Taking place between 6 and 8 p.m., official trick-or-treating hours in Champaign, the drive covered almost all of the neighborhood surrounding Hessel Park, which had been previously informed thanks to fliers given to every household in the weeks before.

When my group reached its assigned destination, all four of us — seniors Rachel Hyman and Avanti Chajed, sophomores Katherine Floess and I — climbed out of the car and started trying to divvy up the houses. Rachel tried to explain the route while I made incredibly helpful abstract hand gestures as I tried to understand. Katherine just watched.

After we finally figured out that we could split into pairs and each take half the street (our group was assigned to cover the full length of Hessel Boulevard,) we turned to go and made it about 10 feet toward the first house when we realized that both Katherine and I were woefully phoneless, and would have no way of contacting or finding anyone else. Borrowing Avanti's phone, we set out, glad to finally be "helping."

Or so we thought. It being the first year for Katherine and myself on the can drive, we took almost five minutes trying to explain our purpose to the bewildered occupants of the first couple houses we visited.

And, to make matters worse, about two-thirds of the first stretch of the street was composed of empty or locked homes whose owners ignored their doors as a way of avoiding any trick-or-treaters and, by extension, us. When we went to drop off our first load of food items at the van, we had collected a can of baked beans and three cans of expired cream-of-mushroom soup.

As we walked back to where we had left off, Katherine realized that we'd made a wrong turn. This shouldn't have been possible, seeing as our route was a straight shot with no turns at all, but somehow we'd done it. We wandered around for a little while before we ended up back on Hessel, and headed in the other direction instead. It was now 6:45, and we had collected a grand total of four cans.

Going the other way down the street, however, seemed to work. We had also by now discovered that if you said 'Halloween Hunger Drive!' instead of 'trick-or-treat!," most people understood what you meant and brought out their donations right away, cutting out tedious and awkward minutes of repeated offerings of candy by older women and men screaming about their hearing aids malfunctioning … and would I please speak up?

Only one of the houses we visited (and whose occupants answered their door) didn't have a donation, and that person hastily wrote us out a check instead.

We later realized that it was for $100, which translates as $300 worth of cans for the foodbank.

By the time we reached the end of the street, it was almost 8, the end of official trick-or-treating in Champaign, and we had filled up the entire back of our van with what Rachel estimated to be near 100 cans and boxes for Food for Families. Seeing that pile was one of the best feelings I'd had in a long time.

We drove back to the parking lot where we had met and discovered the other groups had enjoyed similar success, collecting an estimated total of more than 300 items and $100, exceeding the tentative goal Rachel had set. Despite the darkness and the cold, almost everyone was smiling.

As some of the older students left to move the donations to Uni, the remainder of us stood and chatted until our rides arrived to whisk us away to parties and other Halloween fun, or simply to bed. Only two hours of work, and we had collected hundreds of cans and boxes of food. It felt good.

And knowing it was all going to a good cause felt better.