LaMonte Rusan was 19 years old and working minimum-wage jobs when he made a life-changing decision: He and his girlfriend, Kia, decided they would take over raising his brother’s two babies.

Rusan’s brother, DeMarco, and his partner had died in a car crash in 2018, leaving behind a 4-month-old infant and an almost 2-year-old toddler.

“I couldn’t say I was exactly ready for kids, but I felt I was mature enough to take on the responsibility,” he said. He said DeMarco used to joke with him, “If you are thinking about having kids, you can have some of mine.”

Kia also wanted to step up. “I can’t let kids just be out there,” she said.

The kids lived with their maternal grandparents for six months after their parents died, then moved in as foster children with Kia, Rusan and his mom in January 2019. Rusan was 19 -- still too young to formally adopt -- so his mother filed the petition.

Rusan and Kia got married later that year, and when his mother gained custody of the children in January 2020, she handed the reins over to the newlyweds.

Rusan had graduated high school in 2017 and started to work right away, hoping to save enough money to one day attend college or vocational school. He had always had an aptitude for computers and enjoyed working with his hands. Now, with two more mouths to feed, he searched for a better-paying job on Indeed.com. He sent in hundreds of applications, but never got a response.

One day, he saw a post for a 16-week technical training program with a guaranteed seven-week internship. It claimed the training was free. He figured there was probably a catch, but he applied anyway.

Much to his surprise, he received a response and an interview. There wasn’t any catch.

St. Louis is one of just eight cities with the NPower job training program for underserved young adults. There are also programs in New York, New Jersey, California, Michigan, Maryland and Texas, and one in Canada. The nonprofit accepts applications year-round from high school graduates between the ages of 18 and 25, and also from veterans, especially focusing on people whose income is near the poverty level. The courses pivoted to virtual instruction because of the pandemic, and NPower plans to continue with that model.

Rusan, now 21, realized that the opportunity could change his family’s life; now, he had to figure out how to carve out four hours each day for the training. Kia found a job as a teacher’s assistant to help with household expenses, and his mother took over child-care duties during the day. Rusan switched to a part-time retail job and picked up food delivery shifts at night.

The program has provided more than training on IT fundamentals -- it’s also offered mentorship and professional development skills, such as preparing a resume. If Rusan had trouble with the course material, he would do research online or ask the instructors for help.

Even before he graduates next month, he’s landed a job as a help desk technician with Midwest Networking in the St. Louis area.

Wendell Covington, executive director of NPower St. Louis, says he sees success stories like Rusan’s in every class. There have been 338 graduates in the St. Louis region since the program began here in 2017. Nearly 80% of students who begin the training complete it and earn the certification.

“We feel we are a game-changer,” Covington said, in terms of disrupting cycles of poverty and creating pathways to economic prosperity for those lacking access to in-demand skills.

The Rusans’ kids are now 3 and 4 years old. The couple says they are working hard to give the kids better opportunities than they had.

“Even though we were so young, we had to grow up so fast,” Rusan said. “I want to allow them to be kids.”

A year ago, I received a handwritten note from Missouri’s health director, Dr. Randy Williams, inviting me to join his book club.

We had corresponded briefly once before: I had written a column criticizing his efforts to track the periods of women who had used Planned Parenthood services. He sent me a note responding to my story and dropped off a book about loving your enemies, which I read.

But in early March, when I received Williams’ book-club invitation, I said to my editor, “Why the heck is the state’s health director writing to me during a global pandemic?”

I didn’t use the word “heck.”

This was back in the early days of the pandemic, when the then-president was actively lying to the country about a virus that would eventually claim more than 500,000 American lives. Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a loyal soldier of the now twice-impeached leader, didn’t seem worried about what was coming down the pike.

Last March, I had only recently become alarmed about the strange new virus. I had just visited friends in Northern California -- one of whom is a doctor and a top public health official -- and her words were still ringing in my ears when I read Williams’ note.

“Be prepared for disruptions to our normal way of life,” my friend had said. She advised me to stock up on masks, hand sanitizer and household supplies, and to cancel my travel plans for the immediate future.

That sounds so alarmist, I told her. I asked her if it was possible that students might miss school because of this virus.

She looked at me like I wasn’t quite getting it.

As the crisis unfolded, the fact that our state’s top health official had the time to invite me to a book club did not engender a great deal of confidence in how the state was going to respond to the threat. I decided not to reply until this virus stuff got under control.

Well, it’s been a year. Let’s see where we are.

More than 8,200 people have died of COVID-19 in Missouri.

Remember when COVID skeptics kept saying it was “no worse than the flu”? I had hoped I would hear Williams or Parson speak out more forcefully against that harmful lie. There were a number of other doozies that I heard constantly: The media won’t report on COVID after the election in November (false). There’s nothing we can do to stop it (false). Masks don’t work (false). Last but not least: It’s only killing the old and infirm (morally bankrupt -- and false).

I wonder how many lives could have been saved and how much suffering averted if my state’s leaders had clearly, consistently and forcefully called out these dangerous lies. To be honest, I didn’t hold out much hope for the governor, but Williams graduated from medical school, which is a lot further than the governor or I got in our educations.

We saw extraordinary courage from some public health officials, who tried their best to protect their communities. That courage just didn’t seem to trickle up in Missouri.

Now, COVID cases are finally coming down, and there’s a light at the end of this tunnel. Getting as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible is the biggest challenge. Unfortunately, we’ve fared worse in that regard than many other states. The word I keep hearing from doctors and others familiar with the situation is “disaster.” Less than 6% of people in Missouri are fully vaccinated.

Maybe Williams can help turn this ship around. This may seem too obvious, but how about setting up more mass vaccination events -- especially in parts of the state where tens of thousands of people are on waiting lists? One St. Louis-area hospital system’s waitlist contains a staggering 330,000 people.

It’s interesting that Williams was concerned enough about women’s health to track their periods, but that his concern doesn’t extend to the vaccine. Teachers, more than 75% of whom are women in Missouri, are not prioritized in our state like they are in others. Nor are people with autoimmune diseases, which disproportionately affect women.

We remember the urgency with which Parson called in the National Guard when there was violence during the protests after George Floyd was killed. Given that more than 8,200 Missourians have died from this pandemic, and that there have been more than 500,000 cases, it would be great to see that same energy directed toward vaccinating people.

Meanwhile, I’m hoping things will be closer to normal by the fall.

Maybe we could celebrate with a good read if the book club offer still stands.

Emily Filmore left her house well before sunrise, traveled more than 100 miles and waited for four hours before she finally got the COVID-19 vaccine she had been seeking for weeks.

Filmore, 44, had scoured the websites of every health department in Missouri after signing up on multiple lists locally. She has an uncontrolled autoimmune disease and several other health conditions, and takes medicine that suppresses her immune system. In St. Louis County, where she lives, her conditions didn’t qualify her as a priority for the vaccine. She wrote many emails to the state and county health departments, pointing out that doctors say people like her face a great risk from the virus, but to no avail.

People in rural areas in Missouri have had greater supply and easier access to the vaccine than suburban and urban areas, so Filmore, like many others who have been languishing on local lists, headed for the country. She learned that there would be a walk-in vaccination clinic in Hannibal, Missouri, and checked in advance to find out if she would qualify. They said she did.

Filmore set out on her pre-dawn road trip with a couple of friends and a Travel John -- urinating in a bag due to a lack of restrooms while she waited in line for hours in her car. Once they arrived at the Hannibal exit, they waited on the shoulder of the highway with hundreds of others before the parking lot to the site opened.

Eventually -- finally -- it was Filmore’s turn.

“I was in tears getting the shot because I was so relieved,” Filmore said. Her 14-year-old daughter called shortly after, and started crying and shouting for joy that her mom was finally vaccinated.

Filmore said she can’t understand the disparity between the vaccine supplies in her home city and county versus the far less populated rural areas. Could it be because Gov. Mike Parson, a pro-Trump Republican who refused repeated calls for a mask mandate, wanted to reward those areas that supported him?

“I don’t know why he would punish the other citizens in the state,” Filmore said. She struggled with her own decision to seek the potentially lifesaving vaccine: She could afford to spend days researching the options and then traveling to receive the shot. What about those who need it just as desperately, but can’t do that?

Kandi Karger, 39, of Ellisville, Missouri, has rheumatic heart disease and has five young children at home. Her doctor told her to get on every list she possibly could. She spent days constantly refreshing the websites of health departments to see if an appointment might become available. The minute a time slot opened up in Rolla, she grabbed it.

Rolla was about 80 miles away, but Karger had been looking at places hundreds of miles farther.

“When you’ve spent the last year of life living like you are in a bubble, you’ll drive anywhere,” she said. She also wondered why the vaccine distribution has been so inequitable in Missouri.

“When you take a public oath, you have to look out for the whole state, and in my opinion, Parson isn’t doing that,” she said.

Missouri’s vaccine rollout has consistently ranked among the worst in the country. When Dr. Alex Garza, the head of the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force, pointed out recently that the region was receiving less than half of the vaccine allotment it should be, based on population, Parson accused him of lying.

That’s not too convincing for working moms like Amy Ridling, 36, who lives in St. Charles. She works in public education in a school that is holding in-person classes. Frontline educators in next-door Illinois are eligible to get the vaccine now, but in Missouri, they are not.

In the middle of a severe winter storm, Ridling secured an appointment across the state line in O’Fallon, Illinois. The entire trip took five hours, including the time she had to pull over because the roads were so terrible and visibility so limited from the storm.

She was able to get the shot at a Walgreens there.

“You’re going to tell teachers that you have to be in front of all these kids or lose your job, but then, you’re not going to give them access to the vaccine,” she said. “I think it’s a real clear message from our state leadership about what they value.”