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STARKVILLE, Miss. (AP) — Nan Rushing couldn’t focus on the book she was trying to read.
The retired teacher and member of the Starkville Kiwanis club is normally enthusiastic about books, even organizing book drives every April. But this time, she said, she couldn’t get her mind off the people in town who were in need now that the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus has forced businesses to shut down and people to stay home to keep safe from the pandemic.
“I couldn’t get my mind around it because I knew there were people here in Starkville who didn’t have what they needed, so I went and bought some food and took it to the pantry,” Rushing said.
Rushing has been a member of Kiwanis since 2016 and coordinates book drives and food drives for the organization. She usually sets up shop for the book drive at the Starkville Community Market every Saturday from April to August, but the market is postponed so far this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
So instead, Kiwanis collects food in tubs in front of Vowell’s, Kroger, Walmart Neighborhood Market and the Starkville Daily News. Members sort the collection at a warehouse at Starkville Community Church, and nine local food pantries come to pick up items to distribute, Rushing said.
“There are a lot of students who are here that worked part-time, and the places they were hired are closed and they don’t have any way to (afford) food, so we’re helping them,” Rushing said. “Right now, food is more important than books, but once the jobs come back to life, we’ll go back to the book drive.”
In addition to the farmers market, Rushing coordinates book drives at several other locations in Starkville every April as part of United We Read, a literacy promotion campaign by the United Way of North Central Mississippi.
“My opinion is that with the first book a child reads, if they like it, they’ll want to read more, but if they don’t like it, they don’t want to read anything else,” Rushing said. “So I like to get books I think kids will enjoy and then go from there.”
When she visited Philadelphia in December, her husband and son-in-law attended the Army-Navy football game while her daughter took her to four bookstores to buy books for the book drives. Most of them were free or discounted when she told the bookstore owners what they were for, she said.
She said she is always looking for something to keep her busy during retirement, but she has been helping people since long before she retired. She grew up in Columbus and attended Mississippi State University, where she met her husband, Laroy. His Army career moved them to several places, such as Germany for six years and Hawaii for four, Rushing said.
Her background is in teaching, including at a community college in Hawaii and at East Mississippi Community College. She had been teaching at EMCC for four years when Laroy was transferred to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1995 and stayed there for 16 years. She followed him there in 1996 and stayed until 2001, coming home after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and returning in 2006, she said. She worked in government contracting for the first five-year stint.
Rushing found ways to be of service to others while she was abroad. She and Laroy knew someone with connections to an orphanage in Nepal, and she donated clothes, toys and school supplies there, she said. She also sent a box of sewing supplies to women in Afghanistan who wanted to learn to sew, and she sent baby clothes and a stuffed lamb to a friend’s wife in Saudi Arabia who had just had a baby, she said.
When the Rushings came back to Starkville in 2011, their fellow members of First Baptist Church encouraged them to join Kiwanis, and Rushing said the group’s focus on helping children appealed to her. She describes herself as a lifelong “helper.”
“That’s just what I do,” she said. “If I’m looking for something to do, I can find someone who needs help and I step in.”
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