Foodbank receives apples galore, and more

Foodbank receives apples galore

A food bank in North Carolina received a gift with a seasonal flavor this fall when an apple producer donated harvesting rights to an entire six-acre apple orchard. MANNA Foodbank, of Henderson County, N.C., hopes to get about 200,000 pounds of apples, which will go some way toward relieving hunger among impoverished families in the area. “With chronic food insecurity affecting more than 100,000 people in our mountain region,” said Joshua Stack, the food bank’s communications manager, “this apple harvest will represent an important bump in our food distribution.”

Ironworkers cheer up sick children

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Ironworkers building an extension to a Seattle children’s hospital are cheering up dozens of seriously ill patients by spray-painting their names on steel girders. The sick youngsters put up signs with their names in the windows for the workmen to see, then watch as personal greetings materialize on the building’s steel framework. So far, the ironworkers have painted nearly 50 names. “Every guy out here feels for every kid in that hospital,” said project superintendent Tim McKee. “We’re pulling for them, we care about them, and we want them to know that.”

Operation Babylift child reunites with mother

A California man who was evacuated from Vietnam as a child, in the final days of the war there, has been reunited with his birth mother more than 30 years later. In April 1975, U.S. troops airlifted some 3,000 children, many of them of mixed race, out of war-torn Saigon in a mission known as “Operation Babylift.” Taken in by foster families, most of the children lost contact with their families back in Vietnam. But Johnathon Freeman worked tirelessly for decades to find the woman who had given him up, and this year finally succeeded. When he met his mother in Vietnam, he said, “It was like I was 7 years old again.”