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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

enlarge Staff photo by Joe Phelan

Opinion Page Editor Naomi Schalit.

Today's Top Headlines
from the Kennebec Journal

KENNEBEC COMMUTER: Ford may have the key to teenage driving
St. Paul Center for sale
New Penobscot Nation rep readies for Legislature
College students line up to vote
Lawmakers will face tough budget cuts
WAYNE: Images awaken students' interest in many subjects
JUNIOR HOCKEY: Players battle for ice time with Moose
RED SOX: Lester says he doesn't see urgency with Game 3

All of today's: News | Sports
from the Kennebec Journal

Today's Top Headlines
from the Morning Sentinel

Local students fired up to vote
COLUMBUS DAY: What's open?
WINSLOW: An oasis of peace
LESS MONEY FOR LEGISLATURE
Clothing venture fits pair to a T
Visitors savor flavors at cheesy event in Sidney
RED SOX: Lester says he doesn't see urgency with Game 3
JUNIOR HOCKEY: Players battle for ice time with Moose

All of today's: News | Sports
from the Morning Sentinel

I have rarely met people with the intense good-heartedness of food pantry volunteers.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve interviewed or encountered activists of all kinds — angry fishermen fighting limits on their livelihood, property rights advocates, First Amendment fundamentalists, farmers pounding the halls of the statehouse in search of tax relief, land preservationists, disability rights attorneys. In each case, the people I’ve met have been convinced of their cause’s righteousness — and equally, of the wrongheadedness of those who oppose their point of view.

But there’s something different about food pantry folks and the others who help the hungry. Many of them do what they do out of a sense of religious mission — “The food pantry is a ministry,” says Pastor Tim Murdock of the Albion Christian Church — but that sectarian mission seems to be almost subsumed in an even greater sense of just plain old humanity: “It’s hard to describe the feeling you get when you give out food,” said one of Pastor Tim’s volunteers at the church’s food pantry. There’s a fierceness about their dedication — one school food services director told me “I don’t care what the rules are — we all bend them when we get a child who says ‘Please, please, please can I have seconds, I’m so hungry!’”

After reading some of the early drafts of this series, and after listening to me talk about it at dinner a few times, my son decided to help out at the local food pantry and soup kitchen in Brunswick. Nat goes to Bowdoin and he’s spending the summer working on campus. So he ended up organizing the summer deliveries of leftover campus dining hall food to the Mid Coast Hunger Prevention center downtown.

The first day he did it, Nat called me at work to say he’d just dropped off the delivery. “There’s nothing that makes you feel more like a really good person, Mom, than feeding people who are hungry,” he said.

I was proud of him, for his industry and his bigheartedness. And as I listened to him describe his food mission, I thought of one thing that would perhaps make you feel even better: not having to feed hungry people — because they have the means to feed themselves.

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