Thanks for all the good folks

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

I love this story: A Colombian scientist who has developed the first vaccine against malaria announced last week he is refusing offers of millions of dollars from American drug companies and giving his vaccine to the world.

Dr. Manuel Elkin Patarroyo has turned over all legal rights for the vaccine to the World Health Organization. His is a selfless act in a selfish world.

Malaria infects more than 300 million people a year and kills three million. Patarroyo could have made a bundle.

Yet all the story got was five inches of type - no big headline, no applause. Patarroyo will remain largely anonymous because he did the moral, not the headline-making, thing.

It's that way with most good people. They go about doing what they do - volunteering at schools, visiting the sick, comforting the lonely, driving those who can't drive, helping people who have trouble helping themselves, making the world a better place. But they do it quietly and anonymously.

A man from Winthrop, a stranger to me, called Friday. He told me about a 9-year-old girl in his community with spinal bifida who has trouble getting in and out of her house because 10 steps for a child in a wheelchair may as well be a million.

The family needs $15,000 to build a wheelchair lift. Townspeople have raised just a fifth of that. People who don't know Rayleen Lescay, who only know about her, established the Rayleen Lescay Wheelchair Lift Fund at the New World Bank in Winthrop. Then they organized a fund-raiser at the Winthrop Yacht Club. Then they wrote to government and private companies for help.

Still they're short $10,000. Do you think you can do something, this man phoned to ask?

He doesn't know the child. He has never met her. He's not looking for anything for himself. Like so many other good people in his community, he is simply trying to help a little girl who needs help.

It's this way everywhere. Good people see a need, and they try to fill it.

It's this way everywhere. Good people see a need, and they try to fill it. They know someone is hurting and they reach out to help. They hear about someone who needs a marrow donor, and they wait in line to be tested. They know someone is hurting and they reach out to help.

A young woman lives next door to my mother-in-law. She works. She has a family. She has obligations. But every morning and evening she stops at my mother-in-law's to put in her eye drops. It's a small thing, but it's a big thing, too. Because it takes time and requires commitment. She doesn't have to do this. She chooses to.

The kindness makes life easier for my mother-in-law. And the friendship that has developed makes her happy. But these gestures that mean so much are invisible to the world. They too go unnoticed and unheralded.

At a Scholastic Honors Night last week, the principal of Canton High School read the names of the women who helped organize the event. Many of the names were familiar because they are the same people who are always volunteering - at school, at church, at the library - anywhere they are needed.

Dr. Parker paused to say something similar. All these women have been helping out since their youngsters were in kindergarten, he said, looking at them. They've been the room mothers, the playground monitors, the chaperones and the fund-raisers. They are the people who man booths and run bake sales and write newsletters and co-ordinate programs, without whom the schools would have no playgrounds, no field trips, no assemblies, no social functions at all. These are the women without whom every volunteer organization would cease to be.

Incredibly, when many of these same women are asked, "And what is it you do?" they get uncomfortable, as if they do nothing. As if because they do something for free it doesn't count.

It does. Like Dr. Patarroyo's selfless gift, it counts most of all