Sat Mar 23, 2024 11:33 pm by globalturbo
Good People Doing Good Things — Little And Big
Posted on February 15, 2023 by jilldennison
Hody Childress was an Air Force veteran and afterward became a farmer in his hometown of Geraldine, Alabama. Now, Geraldine is a small town by any standard, with a population of only 910, up from 801 in 1990! So, everybody pretty much knows everybody else. One day back in 2012, Hody went to the local drug store to pick up a prescription and as he was chatting with the pharmacist, Brooke Walker (who is also the owner of the drug store – told you it was a small town!) he learned that sometimes people cannot afford their prescriptions. No surprise there, right. Well, Hody Childress pulled out a $100 dollar bill, handed it to Mr. Walker, and told him …
“Here, this $100 is for anyone who can’t afford their prescription. Do not tell a soul that the money came from me. Tell them it’s a blessing from God.”
And that, my friends, is not anywhere near the end of the story. From that day until his death on January 1st of this year, Mr. Childress gave the pharmacist $100 every month to help families pay for their medications. Now, $100 might not seem like that much, but remember … Hody Childress was a farmer … he made his living the hard way and he was far from being a wealthy man. For ten years, he gave the people in his community $1,200 per year to help them purchase their life-saving medicines. In my book, that makes him a ‘good people.’ But there’s still more!
Late last year, when Hody realized he was nearing the end of his life, he was unable to leave the house, so he entrusted the job of delivering that $100 to the pharmacy to his daughter. His daughter was stunned … she had no idea her dad had been doing this for the past ten years! And as these things tend to go, word got out after his death, and several members of the community are now committed to carrying on his tradition of donating to the pharmacy to help those who cannot pay for their medication. I give two thumbs up to Hody Childress and those who are following his example!
So, Sunday was the big annual event, the Super Bowl. No, I didn’t watch it, don’t know who won, don’t care. However, one thing did draw my attention. Think how much food is bought to be served at each such event. Tens of thousands of pounds of food is bought, stored and prepared for sale to fans through concession stands. Food vendors operate on the theory that it’s better to have too much food than to miss a potential sale of a single hot dog, so naturally they overstock. It is estimated that some years, as much as 140,000 pounds of food is thrown out at the end of Super Bowl Sunday! But not this year!
Regina Anderson, executive director of Food Recovery Network, is coordinating a campaign to rescue leftover food on game day. Equipped with refrigerated trucks, pallet jacks and lift gates, FRN and other groups will utilize student volunteers from Northern Arizona University’s FRN chapter to scoop up surplus food, load it into a refrigerated truck and quickly deliver it to the Phoenix Rescue Mission.
“The food that we’re getting from the Food Recovery Network on Super Bowl day will provide substantial help to us,” said Jussane Goodman, director of community engagement with Phoenix Rescue Mission.
Another group, Arizona-based nonprofit Waste Not is partnering with the NFL’s environmental program, NFL Green, to try to limit the in-stadium food waste once the game wraps up. Waste Not will be collecting food from a number of local NFL sponsored Super Bowl events in the days leading up to the game itself, and also from the stadium
“For context of how much food we move, our records for the last Super Bowl indicate that we and NFL Green provided nearly 70,000 meals to our partners in the Phoenix Valley, alleviating hunger for thousands,” said Hillary Bryant, executive director of Waste Not.
And on a final note, an update to a previous story …
Remember the ‘good people’ I featured on a Saturday Surprise post back in December … the one where an elderly man, Joey White, had become lost during the terrible winter storm that hit Buffalo, New York, and a woman heard his cries for help, brought him into her home, and took care of him until his family could come get him? Well, that woman, Sha’Kyra and her boyfriend, Trent Alls, received quite a surprise last week!
Because of what Aughtry and Alls did, the NFL gifted them two tickets to the Super Bowl last Sunday in Arizona. Delta Airlines flew them there. Aughtry and Alls’ kids also got a surprise: a free four-day vacation for their first-ever trip to Disney World, thanks to JetBlue and The Vacationeer.
Please take a few minutes to watch this video … grab a few tissues first, though.
https://youtu.be/hd6j1l5kuxY
THANKS TO: https://jilldennison.com/2023/02/15/good-people-doing-good-things-little-and-big/
