It is hard to convince people that change
can be started with one act of only one person, nowadays. But there are some
real great examples for this. One of these few people is Ruth Coker Burks. You’re
probably wondering, who is Ruth Coker Burks? Well, I can tell you that asking
that question to yourself isn’t odd, because Ms. Burks isn’t a world-wide
famous person. Most probably, not everyone in her hometown knows her either,
but in my opinion she has done such an amazing and heartwarming thing that she
deserves to be noticed by other people. So here is Ruth Coker Burks, a great
example of love and courage who is also called as the cemetery angel.
Now a grandmother in her mid-50s, living a
serene life in Rogers, Ruth Coker Burks was only in her early 20s and a mother
of a young child when AIDS epidemic hit her hometown, Arkansas in the 1980s. She
took it as a responsibility for herself to look after hundreds of AIDS
patients. Some of them were kids, some were women and most of them were gay men
who were abandoned by their families and medical professionals who feared the
risk of the disease. Even though Ms. Burks didn’t have any formal medical
training, she didn’t care about the risk of the disease and stood next by the
AIDS patients. She took them to their appointments,
helped them fill out forms for assistance, picked up their medications and
talked them through their despair. Sometimes, she even paid for their cremations.
She estimates that she has cared for over than one thousand AIDS patients
since the 1980s. She says that her patients lived two years longer than the national average.