BWI Airport TSA Officer Spent Her Stimulus Check To Support Front-Line Workers With Homemade Masks, Food Donations
BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- When Transportation Security Administration supervisor Samantha Mudge at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport got her stimulus check in the mail, she decided to use the money to give back to individuals who have to work during the pandemic.
Mudge works the early 3:15 a.m. shift at BWI Airport and said she remembers what it was like in 2019 when she was working during the federal government shutdown for several weeks without a paycheck.
"So many people helped us during the government furlough," Mudge recalled. "So I felt that I needed to do something to support others" during the pandemic in return for the community's kind gestures when she and her TSA colleagues received the support of strangers.
To help out, Mudge decided to crochet masks for the Calvert County Sheriff's Department, making 25 masks in black with a blue line across them, symbolic of the phrase "thin blue line" for law enforcement. She dropped them off at the Sheriff's office along with a box of submarine sandwiches from a local shop and a couple pounds of shrimp from a grocery store.
She used her stimulus check to buy fabric to sew more mask, yarn to crochet masks and food to donate.
"When I received my check, I looked at it and knew I could do more," she said.
She sewed 50 masks and donated them to the CalvertHealth Medical Center in Calvert County, delivered 30 masks to her local Walmart pharmacy because they didn't have any masks, and handed a bag of her masks to health care workers who were standing outside waiting for food at a barbeque restaurant.
"I guess you could say they were all random acts of kindness," Mudge said.