Writer's Journal 3: Hunger's toll on the spirit
Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Sometimes, as a reporter, you do a story that makes you think of leaving your job and helping out those whom you’re reporting about. This is one of those cases for me. I’m an editor at the paper, but this project has allowed me to go back to my reporting roots and hearing firsthand about people who are hungry, right in my own backyard, makes me feel both guilty at my own good fortune and so sad — outraged, sometimes — that in this country we have such hunger.

I want to take the money out of my wallet and give it to the people in line at the soup kitchen; I want to bring boxes of food to give away not just at Thanksgiving, but every week of the year.

When I was a child, we had so little money once that my mother told me that I should try to get all the treats on the scavenger hunt at my best friend’s birthday party, which was the day before mine — so that we could use them for my birthday party. To this day, I remember how humiliating that felt — it still hurts my pride in an almost physical way.

But as much as it hurts me to even remember that day, I can’t imagine how awful it must have been for my mother. The thought of not being able to feed my children makes me feel almost physically ill. I understood completely when one Augusta mother on food stamps told me that, “My children will never go hungry, no matter what I have to do, how much I have to give up myself.”

Yet what I’m hearing is that, in fact, children are going hungry, over and over again. And while our society is likely to pay in lots of different ways for this hunger in our midst — children who can’t concentrate in school, health problems related to the obesity that’s one of the paradoxical outcomes of hunger — I wonder about the less quantifiable toll to the spirit that this problem represents.

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Priscilla Jenkins of Winthrop, ME
Jul 25, 2007 10:08 AM
I would like to see this study followed up by a study of why young people like Melodie and her husband have not been able to get jobs that pay adequately. If they are still students, I can understand because my daughter is in that situation. If Melodie and her husband have left school but have high school and some college, I would have thought they could find something decent. If not, why not. It certainly doesn't encourage young people to continue their education for no gain!

My family also raised under the federal poverty line and my father was a professional with an advanced degree - he was a Methodist minister. We knew he was not destined to have money but we always had church supplied housing and benefits and my mother, with an IQ of at least 160 was able to raise us with good nutrition and without knowing how poor in money we were. And we all went to college one way or another. My one brother, retired after 21 years in the Army, is the only one still really having a great deal of trouble financially.

Thanks for doing this series!!!report abuse

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