June 6, 2008

It breaks my heart to see a child go hungry.

You won’t see them if you are traveling along the interstate highways. You won’t see them when you drive two-lane county roadways. You have to get off main roads and back into the fields and woods.

Drive down dirt and gravel one-lane pathways with me into isolated communities like Snow Hill, Rudolph, Yellow Bluff and Vredenburgh. This is where you will find little children who don’t get enough to eat. They go without milk and meat, fruit and vegetables. They get filled up on noodles and grits.

I faced this stark reality while visiting the Robertson family Monday in the backwoods community of Vredenburgh. Five-year-old Cecilia walked on tippy-toes to her mother’s side while we sat on their rickety front steps. It was too hot to sit inside.

“Mama, are we going to eat again today?” she whispered. “I’m hungry.” I could tell from her tiny build that she wasn’t getting enough to eat.

Knowing I’d heard, Valencia turned to me with tears in her eyes. “It hurts my heart, Father, when she asks me that question early in the afternoon and I have to say no.

“I try to fill my children up with noodles or grits, but I know they’re not getting the nutrition they need. I feel bad because I want them to grow strong and healthy. But everything costs so much and my husband just got laid off.

“Summer is the worst because they are missing school breakfast and lunch.”

Valencia’s children know what it’s like to skip meals and sleep on empty stomachs. Like their neighbors in this hidden community, the family struggles to pay bills and suffers summer heat because it’s well over 95 degrees inside their home. It is 30 miles to the closest grocery, and the few families who have a car can’t afford the gas to get there, even if they had money for food.

Valencia also cares for her husband’s aged mother, who is in a wheelchair and suffers diabetes. They live in a small rundown trailer in a dirt scratch yard. A baseball bat stands propped by the door to ward off the snakes and rats that daily get inside from the nearby woods.

When Missions outreach worker Sister Kathy Navarra, S.S.J., introduced me to Valencia’s family, I knew we had to do something for the children in this desperately poor community.

I am writing now because this serious matter can’t wait. The Edmundite Missions together with Sr. Kathy are reaching out to immediately feed 100 children, from two-year-olds to teenagers, who suffer growling empty stomachs in this hidden community.

Our summer lunch program will serve simple but nutritious sack lunches that include kid favorites like peanut butter and jelly or bologna and cheese sandwiches, apples or bananas, milk, real fruit juice, and carrot and celery sticks. Since our Food Bank is hard-pressed and short on protein, vegetables, fruit and even bread for sandwiches, I have no choice but to buy this simple food at higher grocery store prices.

I estimate that for $225, we can feed 100 hungry children for one day. The cost of the 10-week program is $13,500. In addition, I need to offer the same program to children at our outreach ministry in Pine Apple, an hour’s bumpy drive away. The cost for both lunch programs serving the rural poor, along with our food boxes for elders will exceed $38,450 this summer. At the beginning of this year, I did not budget for this expense, but I will not let children and elders go hungry.

You have been a good friend of the hungry poor we serve. I come to you again because I desperately need your help to buy food and milk for hungry children. The ever-rising cost of gas is exhausting our limited funds as we minister to so many children, families and elders living in remote communities of rural Alabama.

We’re doing everything we can to cut costs. Sister Kathy will work with teen volunteers to make every dollar stretch. The teens will help prepare the lunches and read books and play games with the children, a benefit in a community with no library or recreation center.

Please help me feed hungry children living in hidden communities of rural Alabama. You are in my daily prayers. I ask God to supply all your needs as you serve Him and His people, the least of these, with compassion and love.

Serving Christ,

Father Richard Myhalyk, S.S.E.