Unseen but not Forgotten: Food and Water for the Rural Poor
September 8, 2009
A small fan moved the hot, clammy air around the cramped house. Even though it’s September, it still feels like deep summer in the South. It always seems hotter in an old trailer like the one I was visiting, with thin metal walls and no insulation.
I had brought Dorinda and her children a bag of food from our rural pantry. While we were talking, a wasp flew in the window. I tried to swat it several times, but the wasp kept pestering us. That’s when I noticed there was no glass in the window frame.
“That’s how it was when we moved in,” said Dorinda, of the small used trailer she was renting located way back on a country road in Wilcox County. Parts of the floor were sagging and the carpet was old and ragged. But she was grateful for “even a leaky roof over my kids’ heads.”
The trailer stood on a bare spot of ground without a bit of shade. You could just feel the heat rising like steam from the red dirt as the sun beat down overhead.
I thought about our founder Father Frank Casey, S.S.E. who first arrived in Selma in July, 1937. How difficult it had to be working in summer’s scorching heat starting a ministry to the poor. A hard worker, Father Frank could often be found hammer in hand, patching the roof or repairing the floors after a day visiting his impoverished neighbors.
Showing his enduring spirit, Father Frank often updated his fellow Fathers in Vermont on the Missions. In one letter dated August 22, 1937, he wrote that he had no plans to buy a thermometer because he didn’t want to know how hot it was!
I often wonder how Father Casey made it from day to day with just a fan to move the sweltering air around. Then I visited Dorinda and realized many families and elders we serve even today have only a fan to try to relieve the South’s relentless heat.
Driving to her trailer with the bag of groceries, I wasn’t sure I was on the right road. I followed a paved country road several miles then turned left at what looked like simply a small break in the trees. Then I was driving on a rugged one-lane dirt road that wound past shanties, trailers and even an old primitive church, still in use.
When I finally arrived, Dorinda’s little children ran to see me, apparently happy for a visitor—especially one carrying a bulging bag of food! Their beautiful smiles of greeting are one of the great gifts of working in this ministry. I noticed a heart-shaped plaque at the door: Home is where you hang your heart. Despite its forlorn and rundown appearance, it was home.
I admit I was already overheated when I walked up the wobbly steps into the tiny air-less trailer where Dorinda was watching her baby. I was grateful when she offered me a drink of water. However, I didn’t realize what a challenge it would be. First, she dug around the small kitchen for an empty plastic jug. Then she called for her six-year-old son and sent him running up the hilly path to a neighbor.
“You don’t have water?” I asked. “No, sir,” she replied, politely. Leaky pipes—also there when she moved in—had driven her bill too high to pay, so the water company shut it off. The home was disconnected over a year ago! I could hardly imagine caring for little children with no water in this oppressive heat.
Dorinda had worked part-time, while her mother kept her kids. But when her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Dorinda quit her job to care for her and take her to chemotherapy treatments.
“It’s hard, but we keep going, Father,” Dorinda said. “We have faith, and we have help from the Missions. Thank you for all you do.”
After visiting the struggling family, I immediately drove to see our outreach minister, Sister Pat, at our Ana Maria Food Pantry in Pine Apple. I asked her to pay the $160 reconnect fee so the family could have running water in their trailer again.
Then Sister Pat showed me the pantry’s empty shelves. Crushing poverty and job loss has hit this rural county hard. Families and elders, some of whom have never asked for help before, are begging for assistance. I urgently need your help.I must fill this pantry–the only one in this area--with nutritious food for little children, frail elders, the sick and unemployed. Every month, I must pay $14,400 to buy the nutritious food needed to fill 300 food bags for the hungry, who too often have only a bowl of grits or flavored noodles to fill their empty stomachs.
It breaks my heart to see the poor suffer job loss, sickness and sky-high bills. Please help me respond to the hundreds of critical needs families face during these tough times.
You are in my prayers daily as I remember you before our faithful Father. Your unwavering compassion can help us continue to feed hundreds of hungry poor living in remote communities who have nowhere else to turn.
Serving the Savior,
Rev. Richard Myhalyk, S.S.E.
