MY STORY

MY STORY

In 1990, I was the owner of a lovely three bedroom, fully modernized home in a very popular beach-side resort town in New Zealand. It was mortgage-free, and we owned two vehicles, a caravan, cabin boat, and trailer, all debt-free. During a 1989 vacation in America, we were offered green cards by an organization that owned several homes for wayward boys in Southern California. We felt it was our calling to go and do some good for these lads, so we sold our home and everything else. The NZ dollar was very weak, so we only got about half what we sold the house for, in US Dollars. Then we moved to America in 1992. We had been house parents for boys and girls for six years in Auckland, NZ so we knew we could cope with this job.

However, after one year, this organization fired us because we refused to give the young lads condoms when they spent a weekend visiting with family, telling them they must have safe sex. And we would not let them smoke at the home we ran. We also got them off the Ritalin, that they were all prescribed on their entry to this ‘system of care.’ We enjoyed our job, and were good at it. They had not certified us for green cards, so they did not pay us anything, other than medical insurance,and it took us twelve years to gain these, by which time we had ran out of money completely.

Once we were given green cards, we purchased a run-down two-bedroom home in Hollister, MO, with a ‘no-document, 100% loan’ from the bank. My wife took a job and I started my own business as a handyman contractor. I completely renovated and extended this home to a four-bed two-bath home with a fancy stair-well from the basement to the dining room. One of our sons had followed us to America, and by this time he was married to a gal and gave us a grandchild. They bought a home in Yucaipa, CA, and pleaded with us to move there so we could be grandparents to this child. We did so, and bought another fixer-upper, just minutes from their home. Five years later, they moved to New Zealand, and began begging us to do the same, so we could be grandparents to their four children. I told them that was impossible, because once we sold the home in Yucaipa we would only have about NZ$60,000 which would not be be anywhere enough to put a deposit on a home there. We were in our late 60’s at this time, so should be retired. Our son assured us he was going to buy a ten acre lot, and we could buy a removable house and put it on there. When we sold our home and moved back to NZ, our son told us he could not live in the rural area where ten acre blocks were located because there was no internet out there, and all of his income was from on-line work. So we had to rent, but there was no work there for oldies like us. The pension does not allow for enough to live on when rent is taken out of it. We had to move to Katikati, where seasonal work in packing sheds was available for me. Our son got very involved with some weird religious cult, and got bent out of shape because we had moved away from them, and got all nasty with us, sold his home, and moved back to America.

Since then, I have been diagnosed with stage four aggressive prostrate cancer, metastasized into my bones, high grade bladder cancer, and three types of skin cancer, including Melanoma, and had open-heart surgery for a three-way bypass. I can no longer work in the packing sheds. Just weeks ago, I was told I have Merkel cell carcinoma on my left cheek, which is seriously life threatening, and fast spreading to lymph nodes and the brain and other organs. It was removed surgically, but showed up again a little way from where the host lesion was removed. I was given the following options:

1. Surgically remove all skin and saliva gland from the left side of my face and neck, then undergo twenty seven sessions of radiation on the whole left side of my face and neck. And none of that guarantees to cure this cancer. Plus it will do serious harm to millions of healthy cells inside my mouth and on the whole of the right side of my face and neck.

2. Be treated with immunotherapy medication for twelve months. This is not funded by the NZ govt, so I would have to pay $100,000 for this.

I dot not have half that much in my bank accounts. I have generated a page on Givealittle, a NZ fundraising plan, which you can find here:

https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/philanthropists-needed-to-give-a-lot

If you live in the USA, you can deposit donations into our Chase account # 8852866703 in the name of Colin John & Maureen Sybil Stitt, or start a Go Fund Me account over there for me?? They seemed to work well when we lived there.

My wife and I would seriously appreciate your help to allow us both to live long enough to see out grandkids grow to adulthood.