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Laundry day is always on Thursday. Student council members at Madison Elementary School gather up the baskets from classrooms and bring them to the basement for a rotating team of three St. Paul people to wash and dry. The laundry service is for anyo…
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Several years ago, I heard about a magical place in Wisconsin, the grotto in Dickeyville. A grotto is a man-made cave, meant to be a picturesque place for reflection. This grotto is located on the grounds of the Holy Ghost parish and was built by Mat…
Yohannes was 16 when he arrived in Cairo, Egypt, alone. He made his way to Egypt from Eritrea, in East Africa. He crossed the Sudan, and with food hard to come by, he went without eating for two days. Upon arriving in Cairo, Yohannes came to St. Andr…
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Dinnertime at my house has been a bit strange the last few nights. It all started last week when a friend and I pulled out a jigsaw puzzle to work on one evening. We opened up the box, dumped the contents out in front of us, and began sifting through…
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You are my sunshine, my only sunshine You make me happy, when skies are gray You’ll never know dear, how much I love you Please don’t take my sunshine away. She calls it her hello song, often for older adults who are in memory care, hospice, or who h…
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When Brian was born prematurely, his doctors told his mother that he would never walk, talk, or function normally. Ashamed of his diagnosis, his family kept him at home. That was until Building a Caring Community, or BCC, staff visited Brian’s family…
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Monday night I was driving back to the Quad Cities from the north. You may remember it was a little stormy that night. After significant delays and the opportunity to make some new friends who huddled with me in the restroom at a BP gas station, I he…
People who have lost a loved one or friend by suicide have two opportunities at St. Paul to connect with others who have experienced the same. Suicide postvention presentation The word postvention is a term used to talk about the alleviation of the e…
“There’s no such thing as other people’s children.” That thought is the driving force behind a diaper ministry, led by Sara Harless and Amy Philip. They are collecting and distributing diapers and wipes to the mamas and papas at the Madison Market fo…
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A woman unable to afford a plane ticket was able to fly to the East Coast after all, to visit her only child in the hours before he died. A grandmother raising her three teen-aged grandchildren has a car again after necessary repairs were made. A nea…
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It was a pretty quiet afternoon in our house. My four-year-old daughter was coloring at the dining room table. I looked in from our kitchen and saw that my toddler son had crawled up on a chair to sit at the table next to his sister. I watched, unnot…
It started in a jail cell. It expanded to a mobile home. It moved into a couple of buildings. Now, an organization called One Eighty is on a $1.5 million course to revitalize a half-city block. Rusty Boruff is a convicted felon who spent time in jail…