Children Go Hungry Every Day
March 13, 2009
I was startled to hear a noise this early at the door. Was a child crying?
I was at the Bosco Food Kitchen lending a hand on this freezing-cold Sunday morning, the first of March. A violent winter storm system was pounding Alabama with bitter wind and freezing cold temperatures. We were getting an unusual pelting of icy snow.
I opened the door and found five young boys, shivering and miserable.
When children are standing outside Bosco an hour before it opens, you know they are hungry.
The boys, brothers and neighbors, had walked to Bosco in the blowing, face-freezing snow from a mile up the road. One child had no coat, and coughed and sniffled, tears streaming down his face. The others, not much better off in lightweight sweatshirts, stamped their feet and stuffed their hands in torn pockets trying to stay warm.
We immediately welcomed them into the warm Food Kitchen, serving them plates of creamed potatoes until the chicken was cooked and ready. Our staff always puts children first.
This winter morning we fed 50 bone-cold people of all ages before our regular 11:30 opening; people so hungry they risked ice and frigid blowing snow to get a hot meal.
This Winter I have watched the temperature drop to 20 degrees more nights than I’ve ever seen in Alabama. I think about the run down rentals where the vulnerable poor live, cardboard covering broken windows and newspapers and rags stuffed in cracks to keep out the biting cold. It breaks my heart to see children in my neighborhood standing in stone-cold yards by old oil drums burning wood because it’s warmer outside than inside their homes.
I know the difference a hot meal makes to the children, elders and others who have nowhere else to turn. I often reflect on our founder, Father Frank Casey, who responded compassionately to the hungry poor living around him, even when he had no money. He would gather up sandwiches and soup from the Missions’ house to give away, knowing his priests could better go without a meal than the neglected poor.
Plenty of good is going to be done in bringing relief and health to many folks, young and old, he wrote in the early years of the Missions. What keeps running through my mind is our Lord’s promise, ‘As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.’
Following in Father Frank’s footsteps is a humbling task. I know I am called to be Christ’s hands and feet, especially at this holy season of Easter, enabling our ministers to reach out to the “least of these.”
I do it for painfully thin elder Wilbert Jemison. By counting his pennies, Mr. Jemison used to be able stretch his small monthly stipend to just pay his bills for his two-room rental, food and basic necessities. No longer. Rising costs have given him one choice: heat or food to eat. His life depends on Bosco for a hot meal every day.
Mr. Jemison worked hard all his life, putting in long hours for little pay at the local cotton gin mill. After a lifetime of tough work, he is bent with arthritis, using a cane for the six-block walk to Bosco, where he is greeted daily by name.
I do it for five shivering boys from the poor neighborhood where Bosco stands, like a beacon, to those in need. These precious children are our future; they need nutritious food and a healthy start to grow strong and learn.
I am coming to you today because children and families are hungry every day. Food bills are piling up as we try to fill food bags and soup pots. A gift of $26 will buy meat, rice and canned vegetables for food bags .I have to provide food bags for the rural poor, which cost $15,200 each month. I know too well how they will suffer if I fail to raise the funds we so desperately need. Please help. I count on you now more than ever because of these difficult times.
I pray for you daily and will remember you at the Holy Sacrifice of Mass on Easter Sunday. I close with a benediction from one of Father Casey’s 1939 letters: In assuring you of my thanks and the thanks of all the Fathers, I send at the same time our kindest personal regards and the assurance of our constant prayers, which ask God that you may never be so hard pressed for a dollar as we are.
Serving the Risen Savior,
Rev. Richard Myhalyk, S.S.E.
