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Inspiration Nation

This Iowan donated thousands of meals when disaster struck. Now, his free food movement is national.

Courtney Crowder
Des Moines Register

Hurricane-force winds sliced off the apartment building’s façade, leaving wooden beams and bricks strewn over the parking lot like Jenga blocks. The lives of each unit’s residents — keepsakes in hutches, family portraits on shelves, report cards on fridge doors — were now exposed through the wall’s crude, jagged openings, like a dollhouse made from trauma.

A few days had come and gone since a derecho, the meteorological term for an in-land hurricane, turned this complex — and the entire city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa — upside down. The building’s mostly poor families, many of them refugees, raised tents on the asphalt and cobbled together kitchens with hoses and small camping stoves as they awaited help from overburdened city officials.

Willie Ray Fairley heard of the residents’ plight and loaded up his smoker with racks and racks of ribs. He’d been providing the small comfort of a hot plate to neighbors since the storm hit, and would continue to do so long after skies cleared.