Sheltering Books
Mackenzie Bearup has been collecting Women and Children’s books and donating them to Homeless Shelters, Domestic Violence Shelters and Residental Treatment Centres that house children. Mackenzie was only 13 years old when she began collecting childrens books for Shelters and her book drive quickly took off. Today she has collected and donated over 38,000 books to Shelters in several States.
A Book Drive
She started this book drive after learning about a Residental Treatment Centre that was building a library. She decided to donate books she no longer needed to help these children. Then she asked friends and neighbours if they had books to donate, and her book drive took off from there.
“Bearup’s journey began six years ago when she was jumping on a bed and dancing to TV’s “American Idol.” Suddenly her knee started “hurting unexplainably, extremely bad,” she recalls. The next day, the fifth grader’s knee swelled to the size of a grapefruit. After a week on crutches, it was even worse. Her knee collapsed when she tried to walk.
After a series of misdiagnoses, doctors later diagnosed Bearup with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, also called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. The disease causes the nerves and blood vessels in the affected area to tell the brain “that the injury is still there,” says Dr. James Yost, Bearup’s Pain Management Physician. There is no cure, Yost said.
RSD
From 200,000 to 1.2 million people have RSD, ranging from mild to severe, according to the Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome Association website. “The kind of pain I feel is very hard to describe,” Bearup says. “It will explode at random times [and] when something touches it, it’s like I’m getting stabbed multiple times.”
Reading An Effective Pain Relief
Medications and treatments failed to alleviate the constant pain in Bearup’s knee. At some points, the extreme discomfort forced her to remain in bed for months, unable to walk. The only thing that took her mind off the pain, she says, was reading. So when her Pediatrician told her about kids living in nearby Murphy-Harpst Children’s Centre in Cedartown, a Residential Treatment Centre for Georgia’s most severely abused children. Bearup had an idea.
“I think any child being in horrible, intense pain like this, they need something. And something that I knew that helped me was books.” She learned that the Centre had just built a library, but had no books to fill it with. “I asked everyone I knew to donate books, and then I asked them to tell their friends,” said Bearup, who spread the word further by stuffing flyers inside mailboxes, placing ads in newspapers, and launching a website.
Bearup’s goal was to donate 300 books, but she soon had 3,000. I think any child being in horrible, intense pain like this, they need something. And something that I knew that helped me was books. Approximately 330,000 children under age 18 are in Emergency Shelters or Transitional Housing Programmes over the course of the year.
Once the library at Murphy-Harpst reached capacity, Bearup turned her attention to other places, providing reading material to youngsters in Homeless and Domestic Violence Shelters, Children’s Homes and Treatment Centres.”
