Hunger Is Not a Disease

This Thanksgiving – A Blessing of Opportunity

 

This Thanksgiving I’m grateful for the clothes on my back.

This Thanksgiving I’m grateful for my health.

This Thanksgiving I’m grateful for food which is available to me and to those who rely on the resources and generosity of others for the basic necessities we need to continue our lives.

The available food reminds me that we all live in the abundance of this time and place.

Thanksgiving, for me, is  an opportunity to welcome the coming new year:  hope and new beginnings arrive in January.  The energy of this Thanksgiving gives me strength to gather energy for that prayer.

I’m holding on to the healing,  wellness, and regeneration we will  all experience as the Pandemic finally moves on.

I’m waiting for the blessings which will come my way as the Pandemic exits and leaves space for the new reality we will  experience in its place.

And, I have to admit, I’m excited to experience our new reality.  In my heart of hearts, I feel we’re never going back.  We’re going forward, instead, to something new and different and better.

I’m grateful to be here, to be connected to all the efforts of the many people working for those who need food and housing.  I appreciate the support I continue to receive from people I’ve come to know in this world.

This Thanksgiving I’m grateful for you.   I feel a kinship in your readership so that, in my search to spread the word about hunger in our country, I know that I am never alone.

Thank You.

Please forward this article to your preferred social media network.

Thurman Greco

 

 

 

 

 

Abundance 2: LeAnna, Catherine, and Jane – Women, Mothers, and Hunger in the Food Pantry

Abundance.  LeAnna volunteered in the pantry.  She had a business degree, a house, two adorable children and a spouse with a fancy career post somewhere in Europe.  He decided he wanted nothing to do with her anymore.  No money came across the ocean for her and the children.  There was no money for taxes she owned on the house, or anything else for that matter.

LeAnna was happy to take the vegetarian items available each week.  Her children loved fresh vegetables so there was much to choose from.  The girls saw yogurt as a treat.

Catherine had a house full of children including two so close together, I thought they were a set of twins.  She couldn’t get it together to work.  And, I doubt if she could have gotten employment in our area anyway.  This lovely lady had two advanced degrees.

There weren’t many, or possibly any, jobs available in Ulster County in her career field.  And, of course, once a woman gets an advanced degree, the lower level jobs aren’t open to her unless she hides the education.  Sometimes education can be hidden.  Sometimes not.  It all depends on the situation.  The main thing is to get it off the resume.

Catherine was open-minded about the food she selected.  She took anything not tied down.  Because she qualified for cases of USDA, Catherine left the pantry with a case each of pasta sauce, canned corn, green beans, vegetarian beans, refried beans.

When she finished shopping, ten-year-old Robert Allen, our next-to-youngest volunteer, brought out the flatbed metal wheeled cart, put her groceries on it, and wheeled them to her car.  Little toddler Mikey, our youngest volunteer, ran along behind.

I saw Jane, the young mother who couldn’t work because her husband threw her up against a wall, injuring her back.  She had an eight-year-old child she was trying to raise without the luxury of child support.

Jane chose items from shelves where bending and stretching weren’t  necessary because she couldn’t do those things.

And, to return to the beginning of Abundance, these three families and referenes to the critics about  shoppers all owning upscale cars – Catherine, LeAnna, and Jane owned fairly late model SUV’s in good condition.  They invited the criticism of the pantry naysayers when they drove into the parking lot to shop.

Here we had three households, single-headed households in need of food.  If not for a couple of years, then for several months.

For some, feeding hungry people means we fed freeloaders.  Not all hungry people look needy.  Some of the best-dressed people in Woodstock never spent a dime on their clothes.  They had no money for clothes so they shopped at  Family of Woodstock.

Neither of these households was homeless, although they could be when the tax collector came to call.

Neither of these households was without transportation although they could be if the SUV needed expensive repairs.  Nobody in these households looked poverty-stricken although they could be if the car needed repairs.

For the moment, neither LeAnna, Catherine, nor Jane looked poverty-stricken although, they would in time with no child support from the spouse to help with expenses.

These three women had several things in common.  They were divorced.  They had children.  They received no money from the ex-spouse even though each one had a lucrative, influential employment career, money, and a bright future.

There was not a job among them.

There was little or no money for a food budget even.

LeAnna, Catherine, and Jane each lived with abundance on one hand, a large box of unpaid bills on the other hand, and hope, dreams, and fears somewhere in the middle.

The children were eligible for school breakfast and lunch programs.  But, that didn’t give them enough food to eat at home.  And, there was no lunch program for the mothers.

So, it was off to the pantry.  This was a life-changing decision.  Using a pantry requires commitment, endurance, and effort.  Attitudes about food in particular and life in general change.

Pantry shoppers are often self-disciplined, self-controlled, determined to do what is best for the family.

Freeloaders?  What do you think?

Every week when these women shopped I saw myself as a young woman returning from Mexico with my two daughters and nothing but the clothes on my back.  There was no way anyone, just by looking at me, would have known how little I had.

Whether we come to the pantry as shoppers, volunteers, or both, all of us are asked by the pantry to leave; the past behind.  And, of course, that’s different for everyone.

How can we move forward into a new life if we never give anything up?  For some, giving up the past means letting go of the job we lost, the home, the furniture that went in the home, maybe the family, self-esteem, the car, good health.

What happens in the pantry, this shopping, this offloading, has the potential to be the greatest journey of one’s life.  The hungry person learns things in new ways, and sees things never noticed before.  And, finally, there is the knowledge that anything can happen.  When all is said and done, things will never be the same again.  Better off for the experience, thoughts change.

Beliefs and core values are found.

I’m sticking my neck out here to say this.

Being hunger in 21st century America is a spiritual journey involving miracles, forgiveness, endurance, and spiritual healing.  It’s all about discovering that it’s never too late to be who you really are.

That’s what this story is all about.

Thank you for reading this  blog post in two parts.  Please forward it to your preferred social media network.

Thurman Greco

 

Abundance 1: What Does it Mean to be Hungry?

 

 

Abundance.  What does it mean to be hungry?

For starters, it means you don’t have the money to buy the food you need for the next meal.

For one other thing, it means getting put in a category, or two, or even thirty.  And, getting labeled.  When the economic downturn began around 2007, new categories and labels appeared weekly, daily even.   Journalists, politicians, social workers, sociologists, writers, created new categories as they related stories about hungry and homeless people.  Stories about hungry people appeared in new ways and different situations.

The irony:  labels created other labels.  Simple truths seem endless and obscure the simple realities.  Reduced to the lowest common denominator, a person is hungry without enough to eat.  And a person is homeless without a roof to sleep under.

Abundance.  Examining the label, hungry means missing meals.  It means children only eat at school.  Life is good when school offers a universal breakfast to all students.  Lucy holds in a school with a backpack program so children bring home food on Friday afternoon for something to eat over the weekend.

Being hungry is not a category.  It’s a situation.  It can happen to anyone.

Hungry people are real.  In the food pantry, I saw a person with a  life instead of a label.  Hunger and homelessness happened   in many ways  Every hungry or homeless person in the food pantry line has a unique story to tell which is beautiful, spiritually revealing, and heartbreaking.  Each story explains what happens to a person when things spin out of control and the world falls apart.  Invariably, there is a path to travel.

Questions surface:

“Why do I do what I do?”

“How did I get in this mess?”

“How can I escape?”

“Who will I be in my new life?”

The journey begins, not ends, when things spin out of control, the world falls apart, and the person hits bottom.

Past mistakes lead to a new, better place.  It’s a good time to figure out what’s important and what isn’t.  It means offloading things you can’t keep anymore.

With nothing left to lost, you have a setup for your new life and opportunity.  For some, moving into a job means you pay taxes, rent, maybe buy some clothes, get retrained.  This is good for your community, the state and the Fed.

For all the bottoming out, I never saw a person unable to fix the circumstances.  Nobody hit bottom and then hung around down there.  Everyone seemed to be working toward moving back into someplace or something.  As far as I could tell, anyone deciding to commit suicide with a drug overdose or something else left town to end it all.  I never saw or heard those stories play out.

Several shoppers died a socially acceptable death by cancer.  What is a person to do when the job opportunities evaporate, the house forecloses, the savings spent,  Social Security isn’t enough, and the person is too old to start anew.

I questioned the fate of several shoppers in the depths of mental illness.  By the time a person was no longer communicating in a language understandable by fellow human beings, life becomes challenging.  One young shopper spoke in tweets, whistles, hisses, and other undecipherable sounds.  His mother, hidden in the background, did what she could.  I always wondered what would happen to him when she died.

This is the heart of the matter because pantries are all about gratitude and abundance.  Churches see pantries as an outreach project.  Outreach is a popular word.  Congregations support feeding the hungry, especially if the money goes to a group of children in Botswana, Somalia, India.  The farther away, the better, it seems.  When outreach is local things get dicey.

Pantry deniers describe  people as freeloaders,  homeless people as lazy, and all pantry shoppers as owners of upscale cars.

Whether the car is large, small, old, new, or a broken-down beater even, there’s a larger reality here.  Whether the vehicle was driven around or lived in or both, it’s the last vestige of days gone by.  By the time a person gets to temporary housing for the homeless, things are reduced to a few clothes, a blanket, hot plate, or maybe an electric skillet or crock pot.

For me, feeding hungry people in a food pantry is an act of gratitude.  When volunteers feed hungry people, we own up to the amazing abundance in and around us.  We also face our own spiritual hunger.  Feeding the hungry in a food pantry addresses the divine hunger issue head-on.

Abundance surrounds both pantry shoppers and volunteers.  Many churches and synagogues house a food pantry in a room in the basement.  There is absolutely no excuse for anyone in our country to go hungry.

Not everyone recognizes abundance in a pantry.  Not everyone recognizes the holiness of hunger.  I always know those who see its grace and those who don’t.  Those questioning who should be fed and who shouldn’t be fed have trouble with the sacred aspects of hunger.

To be continued…

Thank you for reading this article.  Abundance 2 will continue in the next post.

Please refer this article to your preferred social media network.

Thurman Greco