The Importance of Clean Underwear
February 21, 2012 at 9:29 AM
Recently FOH received a generous cash donation with instructions to use the money to buy new underwear for our clients who are homeless. Frankly new underwear is one of the stables on our "Needs List," so the request wasn't that unusual but the way in which the donation arrived certainly was. It came from a California man, who was in a Texas airport and made a connection. I don't mean just his flight, but a real human connection with the difficulties of being homeless.
It started when he overheard a conversation in the terminal. A Springfield woman who is one of our FOH frequent flyers, and by that I mean one of the angels who regularly appears with donations, was traveling on business. It is her practice to save all the complimentary toiletries on her trips and donate them to our emergency shelter guests upon her return. On this occasion, her suitcase was overweight and because of the restrictions on liquid carry-ons, she was forced to leave a sizeable amount of her travel-size collection at the security gate. Being the practical and thoughtful person that she is, she felt badly about it and was relaying her woes to a colleague as they waited for their flight.
A stranger approached and said he had overheard her story. He asked if she would accept a cash donation on his behalf. She explained that she didn't work at a shelter, she was just a member of the community trying to do her part. The man continued saying he'd always meant to do something like this and hadn't gotten around to it. His desire to help and apparently his trust in his fellow traveler won out. As he boarded his plane, he slipped her several large bills and told her to designate it for clean underwear. "A clean pair is important when you need it," he said.
She got the feeling that he spoke from personal experience with homelessness as he said it. We may never know. Whether paying it back or paying it forward, two good souls collided in Texas and made our world a better place.
Kathy Tobin
After almost thirty years covering the news for television affiliates in Western Massachusetts, Kathy joined Friends of the Homeless in the fall of 2009 to help raise money and the profile of the organization to fulfill its mission. As Director of Development, Kathy is available to help you understand the work we are doing and how you might contribute to end homelessness in our community.