Help Provide Food and Heat for Elders and Families this Winter
January 9, 2009
During these winter months, I think back over 70 years to Edmundite Missions’ founder Father Frank Casey, who often went out in bitter weather to help elders and families survive. How heartsick he was to find older men, women and families living in hardship, starving, freezing and ill. One elderly man had even “sewed himself in his clothes” trying to stay warm, Father Casey wrote in his 1937 diary.
On ice-cold nights like these, elder Mabel Lou had to add small sticks and logs to keep the flame going in her battered iron stove, because it was her only heat. Then one night, Mabel Lou didn’t wake up. The fire went out.
Mabel Lou’s home was an old two-room shack with no running water. Cold gusts of wind blow through her cardboard-covered windows and the tarpaper-patched holes in the tin roof.
Edmundite outreach worker Mildred Boulware shared with me a story about a frightening winter day—as icy as this one—when the Missions’ van pulled up to the adult care center and Mabel wasn’t on it:
Father, when I saw Mabel wasn’t there I knew something was terribly wrong. I called 911 then jumped in my car because I knew I could get there quicker than anyone.
There wasn’t a sound when I knocked on her door. I don’t know how I did it, but l broke the door down. I found her lying ice-cold in the frozen cabin.
I was crying and praying as I piled blankets and coats over her small unconscious body. She was stiff with cold. Then I suddenly saw a tiny movement.
She was breathing! Despite the brutal cold, Mabel was still alive. Emergency workers arrived and started treatment. When they took her to the waiting ambulance, one of the emergency personnel said in just a few more hours Mabel would have frozen to death.
Mabel was the first senior I worked with and she was so small and defenseless, living in that awful place. I’ll always remember that she was eating a pot of two-day-old gravy the first time we met.
I thank God for the loving outreach staff who do everything humanly possible to help the poor elders, families and children we serve. But I’m afraid every time the temperature falls that another elder—or child—living in rusty torn trailers and rundown shacks will suffer in the bitter cold.
The rising costs of heating fuel strain our already limited budget as we struggle to buy food, deliver wood and fill propane tanks for the poor. When I think about Mabel’s brush with death, I know I will do whatever I can during these critical cold months to make sure our vulnerable poor stay warm and fed.
Life-saving boxes of food are essential to help feed over 400 hungry elders, families and kids in rural communities each month. Many who earn minimal wages or live on small stipends must choose whether to pay for heat or food for their family.
I had no choice but to cut the operating budget due to the lower amount of donations received. I need your help more than ever. Can you please give the gift of food and heat? It costs $17 to buy the meat, vegetables and fruit to fill one bag with food for a family. A $30 gift will buy plastic wrap to cover windows and insulation to winterize outer doors.
I pray for you daily as I strive to continue the ministry our founder began with faith and hope in God, and help from friends like you.
Our poor suffer every day. I turn to you, just as Father Case, did, asking you to reach out with compassion as Christ says: “Whenever you feed, clothe, visit or care for the least of these, you do it unto me.”
In His Service,
Rev. Richard Myhalyk, S.S.E.
