Blanket plea gets great response

The volunteers at the International Gift Festival Nov. 11-13 at Mountain View Mennonite Church were pleased and surprised by the community response to a request for blankets for Sudan.

Though the only notice given of the blanket project was two advertisements in the Daily Inter Lake, about 75 blankets and $100 were donated toward the purchase of more. The blankets will be sent to the Mennonite Central Committee for its current aid project in Sudan's Darfur region, where a civil war has devastated villages and created a refugee crisis.

The sale, which features fair-trade products from Third World artists and craftspeople under the Ten Thousand Villages umbrella, has become more successful every year. More than $25,000 in purchases were made during the three-day event.

The profits will benefit a number of good causes. Windows to the World, the committee that runs the gift festivals, pays the education costs of children in Third World countries. It recently sent $3,000 to a school for the deaf and blind in India; that money was matched by Rotary International, enabling the school to buy a much-needed bus for the students.

Money also is sent to Ten Thousand Villages artists throughout the world. A $4,000 check was sent for artisan needs in Bolivia, and money also was donated to artist projects in Uganda, India and Nepal.

The next International Gift Festival will be the annual spring sale, usually held in April. For more information, call 755-8772.

Many families in the Flathead - including single-parent families, the elderly and those on fixed incomes - rely on firewood for heat in the winter.

The Knights of Columbus in Columbia Falls have been sponsoring their Firewood for the Needy Program for more than 10 years.

This month the organization delivered wood to a 45-year-old single woman raising two children. The woman recently suffered a head injury and is unable to provide for her family. When wood was delivered to her house, she only had a one-day supply of wood.

The Knights of Columbus was established in 1882 by Father Michael J. McGivney, a priest from St. Mary's Parish in New Haven, Conn., who envisioned an organization of Catholic men who could band together in times of sickness or death, by means of a simple insurance plan, so that their wives and children would not face abject poverty.

"Charity is the first principle of our organization," says Richard Dick Daniels, a past grand knight and the lead person in the Firewood for the Needy Program. "The Bible in St. James reminds us, 'Faith without works is dead.'"

Daniels, 75, does most of the sawing for the program and still delivers and unloads firewood.

The last two years Columbia Falls Aluminum and Stoltze Land & Lumber companies have contributed wood. Local loggers also chip in, and members of the Knights also go out to cut wood.

Last winter, the program provided firewood to eight families, some of them all season long.

Donations of firewood are always welcome and appreciated. To find out how you can contribute, contact Daniels at 892-4985.