News and a st. Jude family

It had been another long day in Kansas.

I welcomed those days though unlike the Rocky Mountains of Colorado Kansas is flat and the shoulders are nice and wide along Hwy 50. By the way, Hwy 50 is not the loneliest road in America. That certainly wasn’t my experience. At the end of the day I stopped at a restaurant to get some food before looking for a place to (stealth) camp for the night. As I was eating my meatless cheeseburger a law enforcement official approached me and asked, “Are you Mario Landeros?” He then started to ask me if I had a place to stay for the night. Not wanting to lie about the fact that I was going to find a random place to pitch my tent I told him that I hadn’t started looking yet, which was true. The officer then told me that there was a place I could stay for the night called the Emmaus House and that he already made arrangements for me to stay the night there. Shortly after the officer left a journalist from the Garden City Telegram showed up to interview me.

Off I went to the Emmaus House, where I stayed for a couple of nights. The Emmaus House is a homeless shelter. In the morning everyone woke up at the same time, made their beds, did chores, sat together for meals, and shared personal stories. During my final night there one of the residents asked me if I had a rain jacket and when I told him that I hadn’t bought one yet he offered me his. I politely tried to decline his gift, feeling like he would need it more than I, but he insisted. Throughout the 18 months I spent on the road it seemed like the people who had the least were often the most generous.

Connecting with St. Jude family.

A couple of days after leaving Garden City, KS, a woman reached out to me through Facebook to tell me that she had seen me on the news and that her daughter was a patient at St. Jude. As I read her message, I felt a tremendous amount of rage because I couldn’t make sense of why a young, innocent child should have to battle such an awful disease as cancer. What happened next was like something out of a movie. As if in a dream, I saw myself flipping over tables and throwing things around the cafe I stopped at in Dodge City, KS. It felt so real that I had to walk around the cafe to make sure I hadn’t actually caused any damage.

I wrote the woman back who shared more details about her daughters cancer. A couple of days later, while walking along Hwy 50 a man in a large pick up truck pulled over along side of me. He told me that his wife was the one who had written to me. I shared my sympathies and he told me that his daughter was actually doing much better, which was a relief to hear. The man told me that the way discovered that their daughter had retinoblastoma was that in photos they noticed that the red eye effect seen in photos was only visible in one eye. They found it unusual and that’s when they took their daughter to a doctor.

This was the second time I met someone who had a child that was a St. Jude patient, and it would not be the last. The personal stories that were shared affected me deeply. Those stories fueled my motivation.