20 | December | 2016 | 50 Good Deeds

I’ll be on blog-holiday for the next couple of weeks, enjoying time with family, friends and feasts. But I plan to leave you with an abundance of rich, high-calorie stories. We don’t want you starving for good news.

First, there’s this tale about the new guy in town, who unexpectedly discovered that the next-door neighbours are alive only because he himself saved them 65 years ago. Ed Malone, known as Kip, ran into a burning house when he was 12 years old and pulled out two little girls. That was in St. John’s, Newfoundland. He never forgot, and always wondered what had happened to them. He had to wait until 2016 to find out. But the sisters living next door to his new house in the community of Conception Bay South were only too happy to fill him in – once they got over the shock of the coincidence – and thank him profusely, as they couldn’t have done when they were three and five years old. (They didn’t recognize each other, but they recognized each other’s life stories – and the rest fell into place.) “I feel so blessed,” said one of the sisters, Barbara Earle, in a news story. “If it wasn’t for Kip, I wouldn’t be here today and have the beautiful, wonderful life and family that I have.”

Next I have the story of a girls’ hockey team in Eabametoong First Nation. The whole team is all smiles because up to now, they hadn’t been able to afford hockey equipment – it’s expensive, isn’t stocked in the local general store, and must be flown in to their remote northern-Ontario community. Thanks to a grade-12 class assignment in Markham, Ontario, they’re now fully outfitted and ready to take to the ice. This happened because Emma Tworzyanski, 17, had to pick a project for her sports management class. A hockey player herself, she chose to collect donated equipment and ship it to the girls in Eabametoong, where her dad often travels to work as an engineer. “I thought it was the perfect opportunity to use my passion [for hockey] to help other people,” she said in a report. As for the excited girls, they can’t wait to take to the ice with their new equipment and show the world what they’re made of.

Got time for one more? Of course you do, it’s the holidays. Marc Carter, a dad in Devon, England, is counting as his hero a particular factory manager in China. Marc’s 14-year-old son, Ben, has autism, and will only drink from a very specific blue sippy cup. In fact, Ben will risk dehydration before he’ll drink from anything else. He’s had the cup since he was two, so naturally it’s falling apart. Problem is, the cup is no longer made. Marc put an appeal out to the cyberuniverse and it reached Li Jieying, an associate of the company that used to make the cup. She took it upon herself to search her factory for molds, materials and supplier information so that the cup could be remade to exact specifications. “We think it is very meaningful for us to help,” she told a reporter. The company manufactured a special run of 500 cups just for Ben. At 12 years per cup – heck, let’s even say 10 years, since he probably has more teeth now than he did when he was two – Ben has enough blue cups to last him to the ripe old age of 5,000. His grateful dad has now created a website, littlebluecup.org, where he hopes to help other families in need.

There’s a whole lot of goodness in a world that sometimes bludgeons us with bad news. We have to remember that. So keep your arms open, your hearts and minds too, and continue spreading the love. Happy New Year.