Bonnie Lykes Archives - Hunger Is Not a DiseaseHunger Is Not a Disease |

An Open Letter to Konrad Ryushin Marchaj

February 26, 2015 at 8:02 am

It seems only yesterday that we sent you an appeal for support. We were a band of 4 people who barely knew each other, embarked on an adventure. None of us mentioned it, not even to each other…but you were our only hope.

We were processing a 501c3 to open the Reservoir Food Pantry. And, until it came through, we needed a sponsor willing to share theirs. So, you got the letter, and invited us to lunch at Zen Mountain Monastery so we could meet and make our appeal.

We begged, really, but you never let on. We went away that afternoon energized by your openness, professionalism, interest, concern. Eventually you did what you did and we received the support from your group.

You gave us a raft on which we floated until we got our own 501c3 and gained acceptance with the Food Bank.

So, today, as a result of your efforts, there is now a pantry on Route 28 in the Ashokan Reservoir area of Ulster County in Upstate New York serving over 125 households every Monday afternoon. The volunteers at this pantry look forward to serving the hungry for many years to come.

In conclusion: Thank you Konrad Ryushin Marchaj for all you have done for yourself and your fellow man. I saw you change the world around you for the better. That counts for a lot in my book.

I wish you well on your continued journey of spiritual growth. I am proud to have been touched by you. On behalf of all the hungry people we feed each week, I offer gratitude. It has been an honor and a pleasure.

I cannot thank you enough for your trust, your support, and your confidence in our humble venture.

Peace and food for all.

Thank you for reading this blog/book.

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Thurman Greco

Reservoir Food Pantry Begins Its Second Year

September 19, 2014 at 4:40 am

We’re STILL here! And, we’re doing better than ever.

Monday was a landmark day at the pantry. Last Monday, we moved our tables and chairs away from the parking lot of the Wastewater Treatment Plant and set up in our new shed.

WE’RE IN AN ADORABLE RED SHED WHICH IS PERFECT FOR US. We’re all so excited about this step forward. Our address is the same. The clients are the same. The food is the same. The only thing that’s different is the building. We’re distributing food from the building. We’re now indoors.

We all loved being outdoors last summer and may return there this coming summer. However, it’ll be nice to be working indoors over the winter.

As I opened the door of the shed, my thoughts were filled with trepidation. I had no idea what was going to happen or how the shed would be received by volunteers and shoppers. There was also a real question about whether or not the place would even work or not.

Well, shame on me. I shouldn’t have bothered. The whole pantry shift went off without a hitch:

Everyone was able to find the pantry shed even though it’s totally hidden from the road.

We were all able to get into the shed in spite of the step up. The few shoppers with mobility issues had no problem at all.

I was worried that the food wouldn’t fit. Well, that was a waste of time. The shed totally absorbed our entire monthly shipment as if it was just nothing. We weren’t the least bit overfull.

Sponsors who brought produce to our pantry had absolutely no problem bringing it to the shed. We get food from Migliorelli, Bread Alone, Shandaken Gardens, and Huguenot Street Farm every week. Everyone found us.

And, finally, we didn’t get any complaints about the shed being too small. It’s not too small. It’s perfect!

I send a heartfelt message of gratitude to everyone who worked to make this shed a reality. Bonnie, Sean, and Prasida chose the building after searching “high and lo” for just the right one. The board supported our shed with a unanimous vote. The Town of Olive had no problem with our idea and gave us a permit with no delay.

The only thing we’re missing still is the electricity. But, that’s coming. We didn’t need it Monday but we’ll be needing it when it gets colder.

The Reservoir Food Pantry couldn’t be more perfect. Thank you everyone who has helped make this pantry possible.

Thank you for reading this blog/book.

Please refer this article to your preferred social media network.

Please send a comment.

Don’t forget to sign the mailing list.

Peace and food for all.

Thurman Greco

Click here to purchase
A HEALER’S HANDBOOK BY THURMAN GRECO

In “A Healer’s Handbook”, Thurman shares experiences and observations based on years of practice. She focuses on the spirituality of the different body systems, both physical and energetic.

This book offers extensive information on condition and illnesses encountered by healing practitioners. The spiritual connection is explained in every health issue because they reveal a person’s deeper layers, essential for healing.

Healing protocols, helpful lifestyle changes, and affected chakras build on one another.

With information found in this book, you will offer healing to the whole person.

Click here for more information

Click here to purchase
I Don’t Hang Out In Churches Anymore

Thurman Greco’s “I Don’t Hang Out in Churches Anymore” will touch your heart as she relates both the joys and hardships of contemporary American life as seen through the eyes of a small town food pantry. This is the story of how one woman in America found God.

In truthful, upbeat, intimate language, these prayers relate events and stories that may sound familiar to you. They are the stories of your neighbors. These experiences reveal joy, love, laughter, pain, surprise.

Do you believe in miracles? There are stories in these prayers that can be interpreted no other way.

The prayers in this book will empower you to pray for yourself as well as others. When this happens, you will discover just how import prayer for others is, as did author Thurman Greco. You will learn more about yourself and your connection to your community. In this process, you will learn more about God.

Click here to purchase Miracles

Miracles, like beauty, exist entirely in the eyes of beholders. Naturally occurring events, they happen all around us like the wind, rain, and sun outside the pantry room. We only need to see them for what they are. They happen when we open our eyes, ears, and hearts to the possibility that they exist at all.

Pantry miracles never change much. Except, they do. They change how we see the pantry and how we belong in it. These humble events change our inner lives. We become responsible for ways to overcome the hunger and homelessness we face.

Pantry miracles remind us it’s never too late to know ourselves and understand the talents we were born to use in our lives.

Click here to purchase Ketchup Sandwich Chronicles

Ketchup Sandwich Chronicles tells the story of everyone brought together by the pantry: Hungry people kept moving in a line around the room. At times there wasn’t enough space between the people to even turn around. They got to know each other in sound bites shared between grabbing a can of green beans or a package of strawberries. A sentence here. A sentence there. The children were eerily silent, clutching their mother’s pants leg.

The struggle of each person who came in the door could be felt.

When you read this book, you’ll become intimately involved with rules surrounding the feeding of the hungry, the economy of hunger, the biases of people about pantries, and the taboos of hunger. You’ll get up close and personal with the politics of hunger.

Thanks for sharing this journey with me. Peace & food for all.

Click here to purchase Wellness For All

Wherever you go, if you’re healing yourself or caring for someone else, you are on a journey. This book is a ticket to your healing adventures.
“Wellness for All” adds a spiritual layer of personal care to every situation in your healing life.
This book enlightens and empowers you with information and insight you can use. The focus is on your health, healing, and wellness. This book gives you a boost to care for yourself and those important to you. “Wellness for All” explores:

• Helpful Lifestyle Changes
• Supportive Healing Concepts
• Healing Questions, Answers, and Explanations
• The Spirituality of your Body Systems and Chakras
• Spiritual Qualities Unique to Different Health Issues and Diseases

Acne – Alzheimer’s – Headaches – Menopause Multiple Sclerosis – Cancer – Stress – Diabetes – High Blood Pressure – Swollen Feet – Depression – Anxiety – Sciatica – PMS – Heart Problems – Kidney Infection – Shingles – Chickenpox – Mumps – Heel Spurs – Psoriasis – Warts – Sinusitis – Varicose Veins

I live in Woodstock, New York. My life – all 70+ years of it – has been a journey down a path toward a food pantry serving thousands of hungry people monthly. I feel this because, in this pantry, I’ve been using every life skill

Learned in a part of Texas that looked like it came right out of the movie set of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” where I spent much of my childhood

Learned in being a mother as I raised two daughters

Learned in getting acquainted with hunger in Mexico and Venezuela

Learned in becoming fluent in a second language, Spanish

Learned in becoming a healer

Learned in becoming a writer

Learned in running a successful business.

But, I didn’t learn all the skills necessary to run a pantry. In the pantry I got up close and personal with the politics of hunger.

As the coordinator of the Good Neighbor Food Pantry during the time that the economy tanked in 2008 and beyond, I, along with many volunteers, served groceries to people as the weekly shopper census rose from 25 people weekly to 500 people weekly. This chronicle explores those events. In order to do justice to this saga, I learned facts, figures, issues, motivations, outlooks.

Melissa Petro recently said it all: “Thurman, you have the cred.”

Thank you for joining me on this journey.
Peace and food for all.

Thurman Greco

“The most important and generous thing any of us has to give as a writer is our own voice, how we experience our lives.” – Hal Zina Bennett

Donate to feed the hungry

Whenever possible/practical I reviewed the conversations with people who could help reconstruct events, chronology, and dialogue. Based on these reviews, some of the incidents as well as certain events were compressed, consolidated or reordered to accommodate memories of everyone consulted. All dialogue is as accurate as possible to actual conversations that took place, to the best of my memory. The names of some of the characters (mainly the shoppers) were changed. The names of some of the characters were omitted.

This memoir was edited and rearranged over many drafts in an effort to be as accurate as possible. If you read a sentence, page, paragraph or even an entire blog post that you feel is outrageous or untrue, it is nonetheless very real. Everything written in this book/blog actually happened. It’s my story.

Thanks for sharing this journey with me.

Peace and food for all
Thurman Greco

This book/blog is dedicated not only to the shoppers at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry in Woodstock, NY, but to the people who shop at food pantries all over the country. You are good, decent people working hard to survive against all odds. To me, you are the face of God.

This book is also dedicated to all the volunteers: those from the congregations, as well as the community. Without you, I would never have had a story to tell. Thank you. I haven’t had so much fun in 40 years.

“We all need to create the story that will make sense of our lives,
to make sense of the daily wasks.” – Nick Flynn

Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco

“Some of the most important relationships we chart, from which our spirits profit the most, are those to which we have the strength to say no.”
-Sylvia Brown

Many people helped write this memoir. The real creators of this book are the wonderful people who shopped at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry week after week after week. These individuals and families offered us all an opportunity to heal and grow. Without you, none of us would have even had a reason to be in the building.

The majority of the events described in this memoir took place in the basement of the Woodstock Reformed Church where the pantry room, the storeroom, and the hallway are located. Thank you, members of the Woodstock Reformed Church, for your generous donation of this space for feeding the hungry.

I’m grateful to everyone at the Food Bank of Northeastern New York and the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley for the support and training they offered as I traveled down this incredible path.

The Hunger Prevention Nutrition Assistance Program offered needed guidelines to ensure that people did, indeed, receive the food they needed to live and function in this culture. Thank you for your mandate of a minimum 3-day supply of food for each and every person. Thank you for insisting that pantries offer client choice. Thank you for having policies insisting on fresh produce and frozen foods. Thank you for your commitment to nutritious foods.

I extend my most heartfelt gratitude to everyone in the Woodstock Interfaith Council and the members of the Building Committee of the Woodstock Reformed Church for giving me the strength to continue feeding the hungry at the pantry until I knew in my soul that the pantry was going to be around “for good.”

And, I offer a sincere “thank you” to the residents of Woodstock and elsewhere who showed your support of the mission by sending checks, giving fundraisers, offering verbal support, and donating money to the Sunflower Natural Foods Market every month to honor the pantry. Whenever times were tough, your generosity and support reminded me that feeding the hungry is, indeed, the right thing to do.

Thank you Richard Spool, Rich Allen, and Guy Oddo for putting Miriam’s Well together. Thank you to Prasida Kay for making all those trips in Miriam’s Well. Those were wonderful, beautiful, delicious days that I’ll never forget.
All of our pantry volunteers, over the years, offered me much spiritual growth. A special thanks goes out to each and every one of you. All of you gave 110%.

Thanks goes to Barry, who stuck by me with very few complaints.

He went to the dump weekly in addition to the trips made in Vanessa by myself and the other volunteers.
He went to Hurley Ridge Market for produce every Tuesday morning and brought six to ten boxes of beautiful produce, bread, and pastries to the pantry.

He helped stock shelves when the Anderson crew was unavailable. He drove me to Latham weekly for many months on Fridays and helped load the 1000 or so pounds of canned/boxed goods which I ordered on the Wednesday before.
He occasionally participated in the monthly food caravan, helping to bring the food over from Kingston.
He made sure Vanessa always had gas, regular oil changes, inspections, needed repairs, etc. He never once complained about these maintenance costs.

He was a strong fan of my efforts. However, his support was definitely not 100%. At one point he told me that my job was impossible. “Not even a Marine Drill Sergeant would take on the job of coordinator at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry.” He said once with feeling.

He finally put an offer on the table: The day I walked off the job, he would finance a 90-day trip, wherever I wanted to go.

“Take the Prius and go. Go see the kids. Go to Florida. Go anywhere you want. Anywhere. Ditch the phone so they can’t call you.”

I chose this book instead. What a wonderful gift!

He was also strongly against a public meeting with the pantry denigrators. He felt I shouldn’t participate in the planned spectacle. Once he extracted a promise from me that I wouldn’t meet with them, he prepared a special treat for me of homemade cream puffs. (My favorite – totally made from scratch.) They were delicious!

I took some of them to a board meeting and offered them to all the board members. They devoured every one.

Life does have its little humorous moments. Right?