Paul's Ponderings

What I'm going to write about in my column today is something that I've written about more than once in the past, but it's something that I truly feel is worth repeating. It's about the people of Adair County, and how they constantly amaze me - and a lot of other folks - by the way they support their fellow citizens in a time of need.
The people in need I'm referring to today are Norma Hatcher and her husband Randy. Earlier this year, Norma was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer - one of the worst forms of the disease -and this week began taking treatments to try to overcome it.
Norma and Randy are what you could describe as your normal, everyday hard working couple. Fine people, folks who you'd be proud to have as neighbors and who are always there to lend a helping hand when someone needs something. Both work hard, and while they've been able to make a decent living in these tough economic times, they're like a whole lot of other folks - they haven't been able to afford health insurance. And, since they both work (or Norma did until her recent diagnosis), and have no children at home, they've been told that Norma doesn't qualify for any assistance through any governmental programs.
This is a sad but true fact that shows you just how screwed up our governmental systems are today. If Norma and Randy weren't married, if they didn't work and had a houseful of young kids, there would be all kinds of help for them. The people that don't try to help themselves and depend on others (mainly the government) to provide for them reap all the benefits while the ones that try to help themselves, work hard, pay taxes, etc., get left out in the cold.
But, thanks to their friends, family members and others in the community and the surrounding areas, they are not having to face Norma's battle alone. At a cookout following a trail ride a couple of weeks ago that was hurriedly put together by friends and family, around $6,000 was raised to help the couple. Taken by itself, this would seem to be a pretty amazing figure, until you witnessed what happened Saturday night at the VFW building at the fairgrounds.
Friends and family members held a cookout and benefit auction for the couple, and I don't think anyone in their wildest dreams could have predicted how successful it would turn out to be.
I had to attend a couple of other events - the Breeding Area Volunteer Fire Department fundraiser and the Green River Kruzers car show on the square -before I made it to the fairgrounds, and when I pulled in I was totally shocked at how many people were there. At first I didn't think I was going to be able to find a parking place, but I finally squeezed into a little hole on the track with my car sitting partially in the roadway. (I was told that several people sent word later that they came to the auction but left after not being able to find anyplace to park.)
There were probably at least couple of hundred people standing outside the VFW building, and when I was finally able to push and shove my way inside, it was wall-to-wall people. Over the years, I've become fairly adept at estimating crowd sizes, but there was no way I could make a guess at how many people were inside the building because I've never seen it anywhere near that full. I do know that I've been to the fair on several occasions when there weren't as many people present as there were Saturday night.
And once I got inside, I was in for another shock as I watched people bid and buy on a huge variety of donated items. I watched as one cake was sold, donated back and sold again, then again, until it brought around $900. Then to top that, a single banana pudding brought $1,000.
People just kept opening up their pocketbooks and donating until when the auction was finally over around midnight and the final tally was made, somewhere around $38,000 or more had been raised.
The people of Adair County had once again "given from their hearts." And that's what makes Adair County so special to me, and proud that I'm a native and have lived here for most of my life. We may lack industries, we may lack some of the businesses that other towns have and we may lack other things, but what we've got here are some of the best people you'll find anywhere in the world. And when you have this, you don't worry about a lot of the other things.