Help the helpers

Happy Thanksgiving week, dear readers.

If you think back to last year around this time, you’ll recall the chaos in Chico. The tent city at Walmart. The RVs in seemingly every parking lot. Churches and the fairgrounds overflowing with evacuees.

Over at the CN&R’s offices, we’d just published our annual Local Heroes issue. We’d done the interviews weeks earlier. In fact, the deadline for my staff to turn in their stories was Nov. 8, 2018. I expected to spend that day editing those pieces. The Camp Fire had other plans. The weeks that followed are somewhat of a blur with near-daily trips up to the Ridge to report on the devastation.

Right before the holiday, I left for my in-laws’ home in Ventura County. My family needed the break. The North State was still blanketed in toxic smoke trapped by an inversion layer and my then-7-year-old son had fallen ill from a respiratory infection. My lungs were in rough shape, too.

Firefighters had recently doused the last flames of that region’s Woolsey Fire, but the air was relatively clear. It was such a relief to once again see blue skies. The three or four days we spent near the ocean provided the respite we desperately needed.

Fast-forward to Local Heroes of 2019. Though the annual issue is always one of my favorites to put together, because we get to highlight community volunteers, this one is particularly special. That’s because the extraordinary helpers we’ve featured in these pages have gone above and beyond despite enduring great personal difficulties wrought by the Camp Fire. Every single one of them lost his or her home in the blaze.

Their stories certainly put things into perspective. At this time of being mindful of the things we hold dear, they set quite an example.

How to help Of course, there have been countless heroes over the past year. This newspaper has interviewed some of them. That includes the good folks at the Magalia Community Church, whom we wrote about in our Camp Fire anniversary issue (see “Ground zero,” Cover story, Nov. 7). We learned that nearly 4,000 families had visited that historic house of worship’s recovery center in September alone.

A year after the disaster, the communities hardest hit are still very much in need of helpers. People are still struggling. Mightily in some cases. Food insecurity is one of the main issues.

That’s why we at the CN&R are opening our doors this holiday season as a drop-off point for canned and dry goods. We want to help the helpers. And you can, too, by visiting our centrally located Chico office (at 353 E. Second St.) during business hours Monday-Friday (9 a.m.-5 p.m.) with nonperishable food that we will deliver to the Ridge church.

After a weekend trip to Costco, my first donations include an eight-pack of canned refried beans and fruit snacks for kids. Regular readers will recall that we organized a toiletries drive in years past for service providers, including the Torres Community Shelter. We won’t turn those things away this year, but food is the greatest need, so we’ve made it our central cause.

Thanks, in advance, for your generous donations to our neighbors in need.