Note: Not actually their house, but you get the idea.

I’ve decided what to do with the money I got back from the state. I’m going to give it to actual people. In person, too.

Well, maybe not actually in person, but close enough. Turns out, one of Sara’s coworkers has parents who were affected by the recent heavy rains and subsequent floods that ripped through Oregon and Washington’s coastal areas. In short, they lost their house because it got flooded. They also didn’t have flood insurance, so it’s not like they’ll be getting anything back.

Having lived through a flood myself (Red River Flood of 1997), I can more than sympathize with these people. I didn’t lose anything aside from two weeks of school in that flood, but my grandmother lost her basement and I sandbagged at least a dozen houses to help save them from floodwaters. So, I know firsthand that people need to help their neighbors as much as they can during times like these.

I posted this on both my personal blog and another site I write on and got a lot of great responses. I appreciate all of them. But, in the end, the opportunity to help individual people on a person-to-person basis really appealed to me in a way that sending a check to a charity could not. You have to affect change at the most basic level and build up, I feel. This is a way that I can do that, and I’m going to jump at it.

Also, I strongly urge you all to do some shade of the same, if you can. Just talking and thinking about this over the past couple of days has given me a wonderful, rewarding feeling, and I hope you all can experience the same.