They Live Under Bridges, In Abandoned Buildings, In Cemeteries, Behind Shopping Centers And Malls
Homelessness accompanies a number of mental illnesses including schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. Mentally ill persons have a tendency to become chronically homeless. It’s believed by MentalIllnessPolicy.org that there are over 250,000 seriously mentally ill persons in our country.
This statistic is very telling. What it says:
there are more homeless people with untreated severe psychiatric illnesses than there are people receiving care for their diseases.
To understand this, think of the streets as a large ward for the mentally ill.
The bottom line here is that many people are living on the streets coping not only with the problems of homelessness but also the mental illness they are afflicted with.
Releasing patients out of hospitals saves money for the mental health system but it shifts the costs over to jails and prisons which are much more expensive.
While a seriously mentally ill person is trying to survive on the streets dealing with things like dumpster diving for food, s/he is also dealing with being robbed, beaten, etc. And, finally, s/he is not being treated for disease.
We had several of these very ill people who visited our pantry regularly. as long as they were not physically aggressive, they were treated with dignity and shopped however they wanted.
Meet Woodstock’s Food Pantry – Part 2 – A Shopper Touches My Heart and Soul
As the numbers escalated, I saw more and more hard working people struggling with the reality of not having any money for food after they bought the gas needed to get to a minimum wage job. I served people just laid off from a job who I knew would never work again. Seriously ill people came for food when they had no money left because every dime had gone to pay the medical bills. People came in traumatized when their homes were foreclosed or destroyed because of Hurricane Irene and Sandy.
For the most part, I accepted everyone as they presented themselves. Unless they were frightening to the volunteers, they were absolutely okay. In fact, I loved them all…even the aggressive ones.
Only 2 shoppers ever really “got to me”. I learned through these 2 men that there were weak spots in my shell after all.
The first was an older man who came into the pantry wearing a baseball cap which read “Korean War Veteran”. I simply could not then and cannot now come to terms with the fact that this man, who put his life on the line in the very brutal Korean conflict in the early 1950s is now, as an old man, reduced to standing in a food pantry line.
“Our country simply needs to have more respect for those we send to the front lines.” I could be heard muttering to any nearby volunteer after each of his visits. “Seeing this man just makes me want to take a pitchfork and head for Washington, D.C.” At the back of my mind was the realization that pantries throughout our country have not yet begun to really see the returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thank you for reading this post. It has been and continues to be an honor to serve the hungry.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
Why? A True Story Introducing a New Blog About a Food Pantry in Woodstock: Hunger is not a Disease
WHY?
“It takes courage to do what you want.
Other people have a lot of plans for you.
Nobody wants you to do what you want to do.
They want you to go on their trip, but you can do what you want.”
Joseph Campbell
One recent afternoon I was searching through a drawer looking for a pair of scissors when out fell an old photograph. A moment in time. I saw myself as a young mother, in my 20’s, standing with two small toddlers in the garden of a Chinese restaurant in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela…located on the banks of the Orinoco River, the last stop in the interior of a wild country. This was, literally, the end of the road.
An oil camp owned by Gulf Oil was my home for 510 days in 1968-69. What a place to be when so much was happening in the world: Richard Nixon was elected to the Presidency, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, Arlo Guthrie debuted his song Alice’s Restaurant, the Vietnam War raged on with a highlight being the My Lai Massacre. I read about all these events every Tuesday evening when a copy of the previous Sunday’s New York Times was delivered to my door.
My children were learning a second language very early. My youngest daughter’s first Spanish words: “Pobre pendejo, pobre pendejo”. Poor bastard, poor bastard. What a vocabulary my little Michele, not yet two, was building as she played with the neighborhood children in the camp.
My husband was hired by Mene Grande when the company purchased a computer. We moved down to this isolated oil camp located deep in the interior of Venezuela. We coexisted with some wild animals, deadly poisonous mapanare snakes, fire ants, and giant frogs among them in a small community composed of ten streets North to South, and ten streets East to West. I learned to live in a country where a uniformed guard with a machine gun pointed at me was the rule of the day…every day. And, there were no outside phone lines.
Questions came to my mind as I looked at this old photo. There I was staring into the face of my past. Now was a long way from my home then located about 50 miles from headhunters in one direction and about 50 miles from a grocery store in the other direction. And, of course, 50 miles in the third direction was Ciudad Bolivar located on the South bank of the Orinoco River. The river, at Ciudad Bolivar, had a gorgeous bridge – the longest one I had ever seen. Driving across the river was interesting because halfway across the bridge it was impossible to see the bank of the river on either end of the bridge.
I know this because, as I was driving across the bridge one morning in my little Volkswagen bug, the right front tire blew out. There I was, in the middle of the bridge with my two toddlers in the car and not another soul crossing the bridge from either side. As I looked back and forth I realized that I couldn’t see the end of the bridge on either side. Realizing that I was totally alone on this bridge with no one coming along and a tire that was blown became a scary moment for me. I just stood there on the bridge beside the car. I didn’t know what to do.
Within a few minutes an officer in a Guardia Nacional car drove up, stopped, and got out of the car pointing a machine gun straight at me.
“Buenas dias, Senora. Como puedo ayudarle?”
“Se rompio mi llanta, Senor Capitan.”
“No se preocupe, Senora.”
And, with that remark, he flagged down the driver of the only car to come along the bridge since my tire blew out. He then made the poor driver get out of his car and change the tire, all the while pointing his machine gun at the man. As soon as the tire was changed, he let the man go and pointed his machine gun at me again.
He then instructed me to get back in my car and drive behind him to a gas station at the end of the bridge where he held his machine gun on the mechanic and made him stop what he was doing and fix my tire.
Then, he pointed his machine gun back at me and had me pay the bill. “Muchisima gracias, Sr. Capitan.” I said, climbed back in my car and quickly drove away to my next stop, a bank where yet another uniformed man held a machine gun pointed at me.
Looking at this old photograph brought many questions to my mind.
The path to the food pantry, for me, was long…maybe spanning over several lifetimes. If that’s the case, I ask myself, then why am I in the door of a pantry weekly now? Why has my path brought me to this place? Not Venezuela in the 1960’s but to Woodstock, New York when I’m over 70? Why not 20 or 30 years ago when I had much more energy for such an ambitious project.
There are also other, much more important questions:
Why is the most abundant country in the world unwilling to feed its hungry, its children, its elderly, its sick?
Why does the act of feeding people bring up such strong emotions in otherwise rational human beings?
Why does a religious community feel it’s necessary to be against feeding the hungry?
Why does the term “unworthy hungry” even exist? What does it mean?
Why do I find myself living in a community where people, my neighbors, cross the street rather than say “hello” to me?
Why do we have no compassion?
Does it matter anyway? Just feed the people. Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Thank you very much for reading this post. Thank you for sharing this amazing journey with me as I relate the events that took place in the Good Neighbor Food Pantry around the fall of the economy of 2008 and after.
Tomorrow’s post will actually begin the story as it happened.
Peace and food for all.
