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It all started with an email to Mark Gillis, the IT Director of MH Equipment company, from his brother Anthony P. Gillis SMSgt AMC AIS/CCS. This is his brother's 2nd tour into IRAQ where he is stationed in Bagdad! In the email, he made a rare request of Mark's family. The troops were working 15.5-16.5 hour days and lived on coffee to get them through the long hard hours. They were using Styrofoam cups and coffee would cool quickly and afterward, they had a mountain of non biodegradable Styrofoam cups laying around. Mark thought this would be a great project for his family, his family at MH Equipment that is.

After suggesting it to John Wieland, CEO and Becky Czerkie, HR Director who thought it was a

great idea, a project was set in motion. The company reached out to MH Equipment staff, who were more than willing to help. Staff members from across the company donated money to be matched with a donation from the His First Foundation. The money was spent to purchase some nice thermal coffee mugs so that the troops could drink their coffee warm.

While collecting the donations, a mug was designed for the printers (see link below). All in all, we collected enough to send 384 mugs to the troops.

In addition, some calls were made to the Gloria Jeans and Starbucks Coffee houses in the Peoria area. With those calls we were able to collect almost 60 pounds of coffee to send along with the coffee mugs.

Mark's brother emailed him the day he received the cups and wrote "The coffee mugs arrived. I received 16 cases. I hope to be sending you some pics soon for you to share with everyone who donated and made this a reality. It was a HUGE morale boost for the organization. Everyone was blown away that you guys would do this for us. We owe you a great deal of gratitude!" (note: he later received the other 9 cases)

Last week he sent some pictures of a presentation of the first mug to his Officer in Charge. See below:

Mark,

Here are some shots of the mugs arriving. The quick caption to these is that I'm standing in front of the briefing room of about 70 people. The man standing next to me is US Army Lt Col (The Army abbreviates it LTC) Boyd who is the Officer in Charge of our facility of about 200 people. I'm presenting him with the first mug on behalf of you and your company. Because of where I work, this is the only angle that we could take that they would allow me to send to you. Sorry about that. Hope this will do.

Many thanks from everyone here! Like I said on the phone, this was a huge morale boost, that a company would do something like this for so many people.

Your brother,

Anthony (pictured on left in all photos)

We made an impact for the troops and when Mark talked to his brother over the Thanksgiving Holiday, he said you could hear the morale boost and excitement in his voice about receiving the coffee and the mugs. According to Anthony, we have become sort of heroes to the troops over there.

Thank you to every one who donated money for this project. As you can see, it was a worthwhile project that made a difference! Click on any of the pictures to see a larger image.

Here are the coffee houses in Peoria that donated Coffee for our project. Please frequent them if you are driving around the area and need a cup of Java. They have shown they truly support the troops!

Store	City	Address	Phone Number
Gloria Jeans	Peoria	5201 W. War Memorial Dr	(309) 689-9885
Gloria Jeans	Peoria	2200 W. War Memorial Dr	(309) 682-9810
Starbucks	Peoria	7501 N. Grand Prairie Dr	(309) 691-0885
Starbuck's	Peoria	3708 N. Prospect Rd	(309) 682-0653
Starbuck's	Peoria	1200 W Main St	(309) 672-0674
Starbuck's	Peoria	4820 N. University St.	(309) 692-2863