WISH LIST QUAD-CITIES: Your warm hearts melt away despair

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By John M. Humenik | Monday, November 28, 2005 2:10 PM CST | () comments

Simple wishes can go unheard — until today.

Seven years ago, you joined us in responding to wishes of hard-working Quad-Citians. Together, we made an important life-changing difference in our community.

Wish List Quad-Cities, a partnership between this newspaper and the United Way of the Quad-Cities Area, launched a crusade that improved the lives of one family, one individual and one child at a time. We injected ourselves into their daily struggles, and we found hundreds of proud people needing a hand up and not a handout.

We listened to them with open minds and warm hearts.

We realized that we, too, are but one illness, one accident, or one misfortune away from joining them. We asked what we could do to ease their pain, and got to work. We haven’t left the side of our neighbors in need.

Since 1999, Wish List Quad-Cities has raised and distributed more than $162,000 in granting wishes for basic household items or by providing simple life experiences. Many in-kind donations for specialty items, home repairs and medical attention lift the six-year total even higher.

It doesn’t surprise us that our work is unfinished, though. The number of families and children who are falling through the cracks is upsetting. While this crusade of compassion grows stronger because of your involvement, the nominees’ predicaments are more complex than ever. Life has dealt many of them not one, but multiple episodes of misfortune, pain, sleepless nights and fear.

Through our Wish List Quad-Cities stories and the special section that appears in today’s editions, you will meet the first round of nominees for this year. Identifying people like the ones profiled today only scratches the surface. We already have many more nominees with similar situations or worse.

You will come to care deeply about these families, as we do. They need dinner tables, beds, appliances, chairs or medical supplies and equipment. They need their community to care.

What we find in their modest homes is an unforgettable picture of life many of us will never experience. It’s heartbreaking that life can be so cruel to good people who have limited expectations of fame or riches. Our eyes well up when we read the stories our reporters write after meeting these families.

Today, in their stories, we invite you to discover the meaning of perseverance and resilience. We also ask you to join us again in a public exercise in compassion.

In the photos our photographers make, you will see hope in the eyes of the nominees, especially the children. You will see smiles on their faces — the most sobering irony of all. Optimism paints momentary peace, though we know despair has taken only a momentary respite.

The United Way of the Quad-City Area helps us identify these families or individuals through nominations made by their many agencies. Quad-Citians in need may contact these agencies to learn how to become a Wish List Quad-Cities nominee. As long as there are funds, wishes will be granted.

By collecting your cash donations of any amount, we again will build a powerful vehicle to change the lives of the less fortunate Quad-Citians. Every dollar you offer Wish List Quad-Cities — every dollar — ensures that needy mothers, fathers and children will immediately realize some form of peace.

These hard-working nominees also teach us about the enormous value of being alive and confronting uncertainty with courage. Hard luck doesn’t take a day off, but it must. It must so these families, these children with hopeful futures, can catch their breath and step from the shadow of misfortune.

In their nightly prayers, you are there. You help us melt away their fears and despair by granting hundreds of simple wishes each year. Without Wish List Quad-Cities, its partners the United Way of the Quad-City Area, the Kiwanis Club of Davenport and you, these nominees truly would be alone tonight.

Please answer their simple requests by making a tax-deductible donation to the Wish List Quad-Cities fund. You will ensure that compassion and generosity becomes a welcome visitor in their homes.

Quad-City Times Editor John M. Humenik can be contacted at (563) 383-2334 or jhumenik@qctimes.com.