Posted By Bruce McCrory

Date Thursday, 22 December 2022, at 1:40 p.m.

So much for the salutation...

I volunteer at a charity that collects, rehabs, cleans, and offers durable medical goods to anyone seeking wheelchairs, beds, electric wheelchairs, bath chairs, etc.. One of our hottest items is disposable pads, diapers which are extremely costly off the shelf. 

This service is desperately necessary for local people unable to care for themselves, or family of same. We see some seniors drive in with older "expensive" vehicles because their life savings were drained due to medical bills for a loved one. Many return and donate used items they picked up weeks and months earlier. We share the generosity of the gift (donation) two times. 

What we can't offer for a monetary donation (regulations) or items we are unable to request a donation of money for are transported to another local charity of volunteers who are better able to rehab and ship those things to third world countries. This last year that group packed and shipped their 100th forty-foot container. (The shipper gifts the freight charges.) Recently we started accepting surgical goods, even C-pap machines and sharps. Gateway, the other charity, found a Ukrainian group that takes everything they can't handle. 

Our discard items, broken or too old for rehab, go to a metal recycler down the street after we strip as much non-metal from the items possible for us. The metal donated to the recycler is processed further.

Boeing employees funded and gave to our charity two transporter vans (one each Puget Sound Store) equipped with electric lifts for delivery and pickup of heavy goods of beds and electric wheelchairs. This gift was a god-send for volunteers with their own physical disabilities. We often sent equipment to the Union Gospel Mission hooverville two miles down the road. Often, their more able residents trundle derelict rollators and wheelchairs into the store for a working replacement. 

Yesterday, on my way to the store, the City was breaking down the last of the spontaneous neighborhood at the Mission. I hope they had a better option for those homeless individuals. 18 degrees is an egregious sin against even a normally bad living situation. We see some of the worst of human living and abuse. It can be so discouraging to volunteer help under these conditions.

Then I saw a dislocated homeless man with a wagon of stuff give a less mobile comrade a blanket. The old man/woman had substantially more clothing than I saw earlier in the day.

Giving knows no limits. 

Merry, merry.....

 

 

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