NEWBERRY — Two hundred U.S. military troops will receive some much needed support in time for Christmas.
That’s because the non-profit organization Hero Support Inc. went to Comfort Care Corp. in Newberry and the next thing Hero Support’s founder Rita Scott knew, she was shipping out 200 boxes of four-inch memory foam toppers overseas.
“They will arrive by Christmas,” Scott said as she was busy getting the packages ready at the Newberry post office Monday morning.
Scott sought out the Newberry company and then shipped from the local post office The 200 boxes cost a little over $15,000 as each box cost around $21 to ship plus the cost of the topper itself.
Scott said that her organization has a goal of 100 toppers per month. Sometimes they meet or exceed that or sometimes they don’t.
“We rely solely on donations,” said Scott, adding people can donate on the website (www.herosupport.us/) through a PayPal account.
Scott lives in Georgia, which is where the home base for the organization is but. as her Newberry trip proves, she will travel to wherever needed.
“It was a charity I started in 2008,” Scott said when asked why she started Hero Support. “I had been sending care packages with normal stuff (toiletries, etc.) and I asked (a friend) Lt. Col. Margaret Johnson, who was deployed to Iraq, what they could use. She said racks, or beds as they call them, are really bad so perhaps a mattress topper. I didn’t want to just send one so I sent some four-inch mattress toppers. All of a sudden I was inundated with e-mails requesting them.”
Things just seemed to roll from there.
Scott says that the boxes will go to a variety of locations overseas as she receives requests from individual soldiers or lieutenants who will divvy up the toppers to the troops.
Some troops do not even have a mattress so the mattress topper will be all they have. The mattress toppers are better than a less expensive egg crate foam topper which Scott says doesn’t hold up as well.
“If a troop is an FOB, field operating base, then that is all they have,” she said. “Some say just a piece of cardboard is nice. Some have just box springs although the springs may pop out. I’ve had e-mails saying that next to prayers from home, this is a gift from heaven.”
Scott receives plenty of mail from grateful troops as she keeps a binder of thank you notes and even puts them on the organization’s website.
One soldier wrote to Scott: “Once I put the topper on, I slept like a baby. I don’t feel the bed springs anymore. Thank you.”
Notes like that are not uncommon.
Scott has another batch she hopes to get out but it will be after Christmas. She said it normally takes a couple of weeks to ship out and everything is done through a post office through parcel post. She said she didn’t notice too much of a difference between that and First Class plus it saves the organization a lot of money.
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