Two bopping blond-headed girls go door to door, not to sell stuff, to collect stuff - bags of trash.
But it's not just any trash, it's clunky, clangy cans.
Eight-year-old Gretchen Autrey wanted to earn some money, and her parents gave her the idea to collect cans.
And with the help of her little sister Reese, she's collected enough cans to make $400.
A girl like Gretchen could buy a lot of stuff with that much money.
And she has - pigs, chickens, rabbits, and other animals.
But those critters aren't for her. She bought them on a website - Gospel for Asia. She's sending animals to villages on the other side of the world.
"They're really, really far away from here," Gretchen said. She's sending them where children don't have enough to eat.
"I said I think it's sad that these children don't have any home.
It all started one night when Gretchen was going to bed. She realized some kids don't have a bed.
Gretchen knew she had to do something. So she started an organization called Gretchen's Friends. She asked her Sand Springs neighbors to save their cans.
And every Saturday she and her sister go door-to-door to collect them.
"Some of the old people just have a couple, and some people have a lot," Gretchen said.
"It's like trash to everybody else, but to us.. it's just like, wow," said Gretchen's mom Aliesha Autrey.
The girls pile all the shiny noisiness in the garage. "I'm happy that I get those cans and that I get save them," Gretchen said.
Then spend the rest of the week crunching the cans until they're all squished.
"It's been a lot of hard work... And honestly we thought they'd quit," Aliesha said.
But they haven't. And their mom's doing her part.
"Yes. I mean, I drink a lot of Diet Coke," she said, smiling.
When the pile grows big enough, their dad delivers all those cans to the dump.
"I give them to recyclers, and they put them in a big basket and then put them on a weigher and tell us how many pounds the cans weigh," Gretchen said.
And they trade all that aluminum for cash.
Gretchen goes online to see what she can buy. She's got her eye on something big.
"We're just trying to get to one thousand dollars to get them a Jesus well," she said.
So an entire community can get clean drinking water. To buy that, Gretchen's gonna need a lot more cans. So she put out collection boxes at churches and businesses.
At 55 cents a pound, she'll need more than 1,800 pounds of cans.
It'll take a lot of collecting and a lot of crunching.
"That's probably gonna be tough," Gretchen said. But Gretchen knows she and her friends CAN do it.
"We're going to be swimming in cans next thing you know," Gretchen said.
If you'd like to donate cans, you can drop them off at any of these locations in Sand Springs:
- Cecil & Sons- on Morrow Road between Lincoln and Adams or the location at 40th and Highway 97
- Sand Springs Federal Credit Union - on Morrow Road between Lincoln and Adams.
- Shelter Insurance at Roosevelt and 1st.
- Cornerstone Church - on west 41st street east of Highway 97.
- Broadway Baptist Church at Adams and 10th street.
You can also check out Gretchen's Friends on her
Facebook page.
