By CHERYL ROMANO and QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
The group stopped making quilts and learned to make cotton masks. A grocery store manager changed her routine to help an elderly couple. More than 25 volunteers show up regularly to help distribute meals to school kids and their families. A neighbor walked her streets to set up a phone tree to help keep folks connected. A church ends weekly services but opens to help displaced workers.
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, people are responding to the bad news with good deeds and generous acts. Here are just a few of those stories springing up in the Yachats and Waldport areas.
Meals for kids and families
Twice this week, every day last week, Sandi Battles rallies the cooks, the bus drivers and the volunteers at Crestview Heights School in Waldport to deliver hundreds of meals to kids and families forced to stay home because of the coronavirus pandemic. This will go on until at least the end of April.
Because the area’s low-income profile, the Lincoln County School District provides breakfast, lunch and some dinners to students at all its schools. When Gov. Kate Brown ordered schools closed last week, she also directed schools to continue to provide meals.
In Lincoln County, that means buses depart each day at 11:30 a.m. to deliver bags of meals along their regular routes. And from noon to 1 p.m. people can drive by Crestview and three other designated schools to pick up meals – no questions asked.
“We’re used to seeing these kids every day and we know what they need,” said Battles, who taught for years in Waldport and now is an elementary school vice principal in Newport.
Each morning, Monica Davis and four other Sodexo food service cooks show up at Crestview’s big kitchen at 5 a.m. to begin preparing 400 to 500 meals. Six hours later they have bags loaded with everything from fruit, juice, cereal, burritos and sandwiches.
“We’re doing stuff that kids like,” Davis said.
By 11 a.m. volunteers are waiting under the covered outdoor playground – six feet apart and with hands washed – to load boxes of meals onto seven buses that will drive the roads from Beavercreek, through Seal Rock, Five Rivers, from Waldport down through Yachats and up the Yachats River.
Janey Cutshall of Waldport volunteered five days last week and the two days during spring break that the school delivered food. Her bus is the one selected to deliver meals to children and families with special needs.
“I’m not a regular volunteer,” Cutshall said. “But I have the time and it’s just something I’m able to do right now … and I will keep doing it as long as we are needed to keep these kids fed.”
Quilters turn to making masks
A group of Yachats quilters called Leta’s Legacy have turned their time to sewing protective masks for healthcare workers. They are among the dozens of sewers in the Yachats-Waldport area who turned from other projects to make cloth masks for medical providers and first responders.
The quilters — who have historically met weekly at the Yachats Community Presbyterian Church — make a habit of donating their hand-crafted quilts to those who are sick, bereaved or displaced. Now, they’re fashioning health masks.
“Most of the time, quilting fabric is 100 percent cotton” said master quilter Nan Scott, and that’s what local hospitals want for the healthcare masks. “They don’t have to be white — happy prints are good — and they should be first-use clean cotton.”
The Samaritan Health System hospitals in Newport and Lincoln City will launder the masks. On Wednesday, Leta’s Legacy members delivered 78 masks, following a pattern sanctioned by the Centers for Disease Control for emergency use. The masks are two pieces of woven cotton fabric, pleated to expand over the mouth and nose, with elastic on either side.
A pattern is available at the website of the Oregon Coastal Quilters Guild in Newport under the “Projects” tab; then click on “Community Quilts”—oregoncoastalquilters.org. Woven cotton can be sterilized and used multiple times; flannel is not sought because its lint can be an irritant.
The elastic for the straps is in short supply. Anyone who has elastic no wider than one-quarter inch is urged to donate it to Leta’s Legacy via the Presbyterian church or by contacting Scott. “It’s all appreciated,” said Scott, “and it will really help our overtaxed medical professionals.”
Helping the elderly
Joanne and Art Cvar of Waldport are in their late 80s and don’t drive. Reluctant to expose their caretaker/driver to the potential peril of shopping in a grocery store, Joanne Cvar spent most of a recent afternoon calling area stores to see if any would deliver, or put together an order for pick-up.
The calls came up empty — until Joanne reached Laura Mulroney, assistant manager of the C&K Market in Yachats. “She was really nice and said she would put an order together for our caregiver to pick up. You folks in Yachats are the best.”
C&K currently has special “seniors” hours from 7-8 a.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, before the store opens to the public, so that people in the high-risk age group can shop a less crowded store.
In her calls, Joanne discovered a Yachats enterprise called “FetchErrands,” run by Susanne Keel. For a fee ranging from $5-$20, Keel will go to the Post Office, shop, conduct bank business and pick up prescriptions for those in Yachats and Waldport. (Prescription pick-ups require patients to call their pharmacy and give permission beforehand. When Keel picks up the medicine, she has to show identification). In business for one year next month, FetchErrands can be reached at 541-272-1988.
Neighborhood watchers
Although they’re both in a high-risk health category, Christine Ulrich-Lesiecki and her husband, Charlie, haven’t let that stop them from helping their small community in Upper Bayshore area just north of Waldport. The pandemic motivated them to formalize a phone tree and street map so that help could more readily come to those in need.
“We’re a very tight group of about 35 households,” said Ulrich-Lesiecki, who, with her husband, volunteers with Central Coast Fire & Rescue in Waldport. When they moved to Upper Bayshore four years ago, she had been diagnosed with a rare cancer; her husband has myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune, neuromuscular disease. “The only doctor who treats my type of cancer was in Portland, and six neighbors who barely knew me all said, ‘Oh, I’ll take you.’ ”
Most residents of their community are retired, and “about 75 percent of our neighbors said they’re on board with the phone tree,” she said. Also known as a call tree, it is a way to contact several people with a single message, usually during emergencies. At the top of the “tree” is a single person who calls, say, three people; each of those three call another three, and so on.
The couple patrol their neighborhood on foot (“all at a social distance, of course”) several times a day to make sure all is well. Their next effort: “We want to get window alert cards—one side is green and says ‘OK’; the other side is red and says ‘HELP’. We want everyone to put these in their windows.”
“I want all our neighbors and especially the elderly to know that we are all here to help. Our neighborhood will stand together and be strong. We cannot get through this alone,” said Ulrich-Lesiecki. Those in the community who need to contact the couple can call 541-819-9382.
Church becomes community center
Yachats Community Presbyterian Church has become the center for distributing community help in south Lincoln County.
It has taken over the community food bank that normally operates out of the Yachats Commons, which is now closed. It started a fund for displaced workers. Any Yachats-area worker who has been laid off because of a business closing can get $100 by showing a note from their former employer. So far they have given out $4,300 from a fund that now totals $22,000.
“The community has been phenomenal,” said Pastor Bob Barrett, who has been spearheading the effort.
Dahl Disposal is one of those that has contributed. It bought 250 loaves of bread from the Franz Bakery Outlet in Newport: 100 went to Toledo Food Share, another 100 to Waldport Food Share, and 50 to the Yachats Community Presbyterian Church.
“It’s nice to do something positive in such negative times,” said Dahl operations manager Chuck Lerwick.
Lorraine Barrett, who was laid off from her job at the Heceta Head Bed & Breakfast, said church leaders are surprised more workers – more than 200 have been laid off in Yachats alone — haven’t come to take advantage of the cash help.
“People may be OK for now,” she said. “But take the money and put it away for when you really need it.”
One of those who got money from the fund Wednesday was Alissa Clark, who lost her restaurant job this week.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “I’ll put it toward my electric bill or food.”
Food bank and displaced worker fund hours are 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Fridays. Donations can be made by calling the church at 541-547-3400.
Have another suggestions for other stories of people helping the community? Send them to YachatsNews@gmail.com
