Volunteer returns the favor

This fall, when Nancy Bottke’s fiance lost his job as a landscaper, leaving the couple and her son to survive on about $1,000 a month, she made a curious decision: She decided to volunteer.

Bottke, a 38-year-old former carnival worker, spends 40 hours a week stacking toys and lending a hand in a cavernous warehouse at the Christmas Bureau.

She is acutely aware of the irony of giving her time to a charity for which she herself qualifies.

“It feels good to be able to help them out,” Bottke said this week, stacking board games and children’s toys at The Spokesman- Review’s Christmas Bureau at the Spokane County Fair and Expo Center. “I’ve been there before.”

Among the staff, Bottke has earned a reputation for being hard-working and intelligent, according to Karen Orlando, the bureau’s coordinator for Catholic Charities.

“She’s just a workhorse,” Orlando said.

Today, Bottke finds herself in a thoroughly modern Catch-22: If she takes a part-time job, she fears she will lose her federal health insurance, which pays the bulk of her medication bill. And what part-time job, she asked, provides health insurance?

So Bottke works for free. Eight hours a day. Five days a week through the holidays. At home, the budget is tight – but it’s been worse, she said.

“It’s pay the rent, pay the bills and not much left over,” she said. “It’d be nice to go (to dinner) once in a while. But we get by. That’s all you need to do to be happy in life.”

In 1997, Bottke first found herself at the bureau, which gives away hundreds of thousands of dollars in Christmas gifts and food vouchers each year. Struggling with bipolar disorder that left her depressed and trying to raise a 12-year-old boy alone, Bottke found herself at wit’s end. The boy’s father had been arrested for an outstanding warrant and jailed two months after their marriage, she said. From time to time, Bottke said, he sends a child-support payment.

Born in Tacoma, she landed in Spokane seven years ago because, “It’s where the carnival ended up,” she said. After 16 years running rides for a carnival that traveled around the Northwest, she wanted a stable home and a place to raise her son.

With little money, she found that a difficult task.

“At the time, I really needed the help,” Bottke said. “My son wouldn’t have had a Christmas that year. Like all kids, he expected something.”

In the roughest times, she said, she once ate popcorn and cheap noodles for months at a time, spending money instead on her son’s meals. She considered selling drugs to raise money, or prostitution, worried that she would be unable to provide for her son.

“The thoughts go through your mind,” Bottke said. “You can’t understand it if you’ve never been there. The upper society has never been at that point. They don’t understand.”

Later, she said, “I don’t have any of those thoughts anymore.”

Yet she remains unemployed, save for these few weeks when she volunteers her time.

“I miss working,” she said. “Stuck in a house all day, you get a little cabin fever.”

So she arrives early and stays late. She ferries boxes of games and offers demonstrations on how to use the most complicated toys. She spends the day on her feet, sweeping across the concrete floor, arms loaded. And in the faces of the people she helps, she said, she sometimes sees a glimpse of herself.