Benjamin Shors

On the day after Christmas, a desperate Joseph Kalani Hatchie walked into a cigarette store near the Idaho state line with an unloaded pellet gun. He never walked out. The 47-year-old father and former military policeman, had no criminal record, faced a December eviction from his family's rental duplex in Greenacres and a pile of medical bills. But he told his wife not to worry about the money problems.

At times on the final day of the Christmas Bureau, it appeared that the volunteers – the stockers and boxers, the greeters and cleaners, those who worked in data entry and as line sentries – outnumbered those being helped. "We have volunteers of all abilities and talents," said Karen Orlando, the bureau's coordinator for Catholic Charities.

When the curtains pulled back revealing row after row of Christmas presents, an audible gasp ran through the crowd at Post Falls High School on Saturday. "This has simply got to be one of the most incredible programs put together," said Teresa Morgan, a 43-year-old Coeur d'Alene woman and foster parent to her two grandchildren. "It gives me goose bumps."

Rising rents are increasingly squeezing the working poor, forcing full-time workers to choose between paying the landlord or paying heating bills, according to a national study released Tuesday. Workers in Spokane County must earn $12.19 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment – about an 11 percent increase in the past year, according to the study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Coeur d'Alene is close behind at $12 an hour.

Now the trailer home in the Valley, with its leaky roof and rat's nest of electrical wires, is little more than a bad memory. And a lesson. It is where Debbie Osborne began to build a better life. With two kids and $440 a month in welfare, she depended on the kindness of strangers. The manager of her trailer helped her move into a better place, helped her build a porch to sit on in the evenings.

The state's child welfare administration plans to cut spending on two prominent programs that serve hundreds of neglected and abused children and their families in Spokane. The Children's Administration plans to cut $142,000 from a contract held by Partners with Families and Children, a respected Spokane agency that has operated since 1988, as well as eliminate funding for the Martin Luther King Jr. Family Outreach Center.

It was an unusual Thanksgiving story. To a stilled audience in St. Mark's Lutheran Church, Alexander Kaprian recalled that in World War II, his grandparents helped hide German Jews and Russian prisoners of war. Kaprian, the pastor of Pilgrim Slavic Baptist Church, said his grandmother and other women gave food to German soldiers in exchange for the release of men and women about to be executed.

In a makeshift cafeteria in the heart of the city, Rita Seaman fondly recalled Thanksgivings past: The turkeys. The pies. The throngs of family members who filled her home. "All my brothers are gone; all my sisters are gone," said Seaman, a 92-year-old widow. "But I'm going to be around for a lot more." Seaman was one of hundreds of elderly residents served by Spokane County's Meals on Wheels programs on Thanksgiving Day. The two agencies – one located downtown and the other in Spokane Valley – served 200,000 meals last year to seniors living at home.

A minor toothache turned into a huge headache for Angee Friedrich. The 28-year-old volunteer coordinator for a Spokane nonprofit organization had no dental insurance but found a dentist willing to treat the infected tooth – provided Friedrich cover the expenses. When an allergic reaction to an antibiotic led to a brief hospital stay, Friedrich's bill suddenly topped $1,500. "I don't even know how much I owe the hospital," said Friedrich, who supports her three children on a job that pays less than $10 an hour. "I try not to open those envelopes until I can deal with them."