Not long before Air Force Sgt. Paul Baptist shipped out to Afghanistan for his third Middle East tour, he stopped to see his neighborhood Avon Lady, Beverly Foster.
“He asked me if I could get him some of Avon’s Moisture Therapy cream and lip balm,” said the 10-year veteran independent sales agent, who doubles as a cashier and pizza maker at Round Pond’s King Ro market.
When she got him some, she said she got to thinking, “I’ll bet others might like some of that stuff.”
Wait a minute. American’s warriors want moisture cream and lip balm. Isn’t that, well, sort of, sissy stuff?
Not on your life said Baptist.
“In the desert countries, your lips dry out and so does your skin. You really need that stuff,” said Baptist who is home on convalescent leave after being injured at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.
Several years ago, after the tragic death of her husband, Everett, Beverly decided to go back to work and asked for a job at the King Ro market. “After a while, I knew I had to get out of the house,” she said.
Beverly admits she was sort of down after Everett died. After all, they were together every day for 38 years. She was his wife, the mother of their children, and worked every day as the sternman on their lobster boat, Works for Me.
“You know it is love when you are up to your elbows in a lobster bait barrel,” she admitted with a grin.
Going to work helped her recover from the loss. Helping others helped her recover her personality. Taking on a project to help American men and women serving overseas brought her joy.
This summer, after talking to Sgt. Baptist, she put out a donation can at the market. Folks started dropping change and a few bucks in it. Some donations were a lot more than a few bucks.
It didn’t take long for the story of her overseas troop packages to get around. It didn’t take long for her customers and friends to ask if she would know where they could find someone to send moisture cream and lip balm to their brother, or son, or cousin, or even friend of a friend.
“Give me their names,” she replied.
By the end of the summer, she had collected more than $900 in donations and had sent off more than 20 packages.
“I buy the products at cost, my cost. I don’t make anything off them. I pack 50 little tubes of moisture cream and 50 tubes of lip balm and send them off. It costs $11.95 to mail them to Iraq or Afghanistan,” she said.
Round Pond postmaster Steve Culpovich helps her package them up and mail them off using a special box that qualifies for a special U.S. Postal Service rate.
Recently, she sent off a package to the friend of a friend who is a Marine Lieutenant Colonel in an infantry regiment in Iraq.
When he got his package, he wrote back thanking her, and suggesting she might want to send a similar package to one of his pals, who was with a Marine regiment in Afghanistan.
The Marine Lt. Colonel in Iraq neglected to include the first name of his friend.
No first name? Not a problem for Beverly. She just sent it off to him using his rank and last name. Last week, with the help of her friendly postmaster, she mailed packages to both Marines.
Then she slipped the postal receipts in the red scrapbook she keeps on the project.
“She has done something above and beyond,” said Baptist.
“It is something that makes life just a bit more comfortable,” he said.
“It is not about me. It is all about the guys who get the product,” said Beverly Foster, the ex-sternman, grocery clerk and pizza maker turned volunteer guardian angel to American men and women serving overseas.