On Saturday May 2nd, members and friends of Branch 302 in New Brunswick, NJ got together for Join Hands Day. The purpose of the event was to bring together people of differing backgrounds and generations to perform valuable work for the community. This year we decided to focus on The Hungarian Reformed Church and the Teleki Pál Scout Home. In the Hungarian Community is split amongst those that can speak the language and those who no longer can. This year we made a point of bringing together not only people of many generations, but also the two cultural groups to make sure we had fellowship with people who, while members of our common community, tend not to spend time together.

We were extremely lucky in two ways. First the weather in New Jersey had been rainy and Saturday turned out to be the only sunny day in the week. Beside that, we knew that we were going to generate a lot of trash that day, but due to the complications and cost of disposing of trash we weren't exactly sure of what we were going to do with all of it.

In the morning the group gathered at the Hungarian Reformed Church on Somerset Street. The participants included children from the Aprokfalva Montessori Preschool, The Széchenyi Hungarian School and the Hungarian Boy Scout Troop. We also had seniors from the Hungarian Reformed Church and some young adults from both the Hungarian Reformed Church and the St. Ladislaus Hungarian Catholic Church.

The goals at the Reformed Church were to tear down and unused shed and clean out a garage area. Also, the seniors and preschoolers “joined hands” to pot and plant flowers around the Church properties. The children had a great time and each child was able to take home a potted geranium for their mothers. The adult crew took some sledgehammers and power equipment to the old shed and tore it down. This project was important because the unused shed had become an eyesore. Mr. Mozes Kovacs not only offered his business' dumpster for the demolished shed, but he hauled away the pieces in his van. There was another 15 bags of trash that was put out for the Sanitation Department. The work started at around 9AM. There were in all about 20 volunteers who helped pitch in for this phase of the day.

At around noon the focus of the work turned to the Teleki Pál Scout Home yard. The yard was in a serious state of disrepair with trash and leaves all over the place. Here four intrepid volunteers from the previous phase as well as a dozen boys from the Scout troop got to work bagging the yard waste. All in all about 50 bags of trash were collected. A local Hungarian business owner Mr. Thomas Vajtay of SLM Manufacturing, generously allowed our group to fill an entire dumpster with the collected refuse.

The event brought together many people that would not have otherwise worked together for a common cause. All in all about 40 people donated their labor or resources to make the event work. Everyone involved agreed that the Join Hands Day concept is a great one and we will all work toward making next year an even bigger success.