Here’s a story that will blanch our own real and perceived suffering.

Despite his own organization’s difficulties, Franklin Graham joined Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and faith-based Samaritan’s Purse last week to bring food to hundreds of families along the frozen Yukon River. The harsher-than-normal winter has led to extreme cutbacks:

According to Graham’s organization, many along the Yukon say they’ve been eating only once a day after running short on the fish and berries they stored away last year. Others are so impoverished they have had to choose between heat and food in an area where a gallon of fuel can cost $8 and a gallon of milk can run as high as $10.

“Sometimes when you’re in these little villages, you wonder, ‘Has the rest of the world forgotten us?’” noted Graham.

Samaritan’s Purse is delivering 44 thousand pounds of groceries to the villages of Marshall and Russian Mission, located just below the Arctic Circle, approximately 400 to 500 miles from Anchorage.

This also serves as a lesson for those of us in the lower 48 - that solutions are not all found in the government. Gov. Palin told the Anchorage Daily News that one of the purposes behind the distribution was to show “it’s the public-private partnerships that are key here.”