OUR NEIGHBORS: Volunteer a septuagenarian buzz saw

MAT-SU — May Heaven help you if Helen Munoz thinks you can help.

Local politicians and government agents have come to expect her brash style dealing with issues close to the ex-New Yorker’s heart. Whether its financial literacy, wastewater treatment or hospice care, she will let you know why she’s right and what you need to do.

“I get along fine with most people,” Munoz said. “Just not politicians.”

After almost 40 years of affecting local change, Munoz was recognized as the 2009 Dorothy A. Jones Volunteer of the Year Award by the United Way of Mat-Su.

Munoz said she has worked every day of her life after her dad died when she was a child. Married at 19, and with her first child a year later, Munoz raised a family while helping her husband establish and run a septic tank pumping business in Westchester County, N.Y.

After learning the value of a dollar the hard way, she sees today’s society growing up without the knowledge of fiscal responsibility. She drafted a petition to include financial literacy classes in the school curriculum because, “If you can reach just one kid, it’s worth your effort.”

“It’s in the school board’s hands and the state legislators,” Munoz said. “They are coming home soon, and they will have to deal with me.”

Two of the children she raised died of illnesses too soon — one of AIDS and one of prostate cancer. When one became terminal, he opted to leave the hospital so he could die at home.

“I had never been with a person who passed away. I didn’t think I could do it,” she said.

Even though he was not officially in hospice care, Munoz said her son’s nurse came to the house right around the time he died. It was only through the nurse’s counseling she was able to be with her son when he passed away, she said.

Munoz has worked with hospice care providers ever since. She has personally run the hospice tree in downtown Palmer for 13 years, a fund-raiser that has since opened up another location in Wasilla. When Mat-Su Regional Medical Center turned into a for-profit facility, Munoz helped found the non-profit Mat-Su Hospice Foundation. The foundation provides in-home care for terminal patients as well as bereavement services for their relatives. The foundation’s ultimate goal, she said, is to open a facility for patients with nowhere else to go.

“I would like to see a hospice house here before I die, and I don’t want to be the first resident of it,” Munoz said.

After moving to Alaska in 1972, Munoz and her husband started another septic tank pumping system. Thirty-eight years later, she is appalled the Mat-Su Valley still does not have its own wastewater treatment facility for pumpage. Trucks still have to drive to the Anchorage facility, a facility that does a woeful job of treating the material, she said. Munoz has been hounding borough and state employees and representatives about the topic for years, and “they are probably glad I’m as old as I am,” she said.

At 79, Munoz said she has no intention of letting up anytime soon. With no more children at home, she found even more energy when she got divorced after 42 years of marriage.

“I said I could sit at home and cry about it, or get up and do something in the community,” Munoz said.

She said once she starts something, it’s in her nature not to stop until it’s complete.

“The only thing that can stop me is my health,” Munoz said. “And if I have my mind, I can get around in a wheel chair.”

Contact Todd L. Disher at todd.disher@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.