Today I’d like to share a story with my readers and a request for help. In my day job, I was calling on a client and saw a flier that gave details about how a young girl fell ill on Easter and not too long after, had lost her limbs to a strain of pneumonia called “streptococcus pneumoniae sepsis.” The flier referenced a web site her family set up, FriendsOfBella.org to help raise money for many of the things she’ll need, among them retrofitting her house to make it wheelchair accessible for one. That night, I made my donation and tweeted the story. A number of my tweeps wrote to me that they also donated, a couple checking with me that I verified the story was true. Fortunately, the local paper, the Boston Herald ran an article, Girl’s harrowing journey defies deadly odds.
Time passed and my desire to help increased. I stopped by her Facebook page and got permission to add a widget to my sidebar, and invite fellow bloggers to do the same. I asked my fellow blogger Pete Anderson who is a skilled graphic artist and owner of Logos For Websites to take the image from their site and create the widget for me.
Pete did a great job, and asked that I take his fee and forward it on to the fundraising efforts. If you are a blogger, please feel free to do what you’re comfortable, adding the image and linking, or just slipping the story into a weekly roundup. If you are a regular reader, you know I never have my hand out, except on behalf of others, my top non-religious charities linked to the right.
Let’s send a message to Bella and her family, there are people out there who you may never have met, but are two, three, four degrees of separation away from you, and your story has touched us.