Monday, July 23, 2007
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Staff photo by Jim EvansThe old crumpled farmhouse looks as if it has taken its last breath, exhaled and given up. Covered with more bare clapboards than painted ones, it slumps along the edge of a narrow country road in Farmingdale, surrounded by trailers.
Sandy Kalloch whizzes out of the house on her motorized wheelchair. The double amputee, who lost her legs to thrombosis, throws her arms up and shouts, "We're over here!" in a raspy, cigarette-colored voice. She whirls around, races back up an uneven wooden ramp, knocks open her back door and enters her dark, hot and smoke-filled kitchen.
This is where 64-year-old Kalloch lives. This is where her refrigerator holds a few bottles of salad dressing, half a dozen eggs, a jar of mayonnaise, a plastic container of leftovers from the night before, a turnip and a cabbage. This is the place where Kalloch gets her monthly food box delivered by the Gardiner Food Bank. This is where a woman who worked hard all her adult life, earning $500 a week as a stitcher, and equally good money at AMHI and at the county jail, now lives on $657 a month in Social Security disability payments plus a little more in state aid.
"Hungry? I've seen times when I have been," says Kalloch.
Here's the math at Kalloch's house: $657 in Social Security comes in each month, plus $10 a month from the state. She pays $250 for rent, $30 for electricity, $25 for the phone, $60 every month for fuel, $50 for cigarettes and $45 for cable television. That leaves $48 a week for everything else, which is why she qualifies for $123 a month in food stamps.
How does she do it? "Very gently."
"You can't buy the nutritious things you'd like to," she says. "Especially when groceries have gone up astronomically. You can't really buy the food you want because you can't afford it. You go to buy something at the grocery store, it seems as though right before you got there they raised the price."
That's where the Gardiner food pantry comes in.
"The food pantry, they're awesome. They're just awesome," says Kalloch. "They deliver my stuff -- bread, soups, Rice-a-Roni, canned fruits, potatoes, sometimes meat if they have it, hot dogs, sandwich meat, cereal and, when the gardens are up, all kinds of vegetables."
But, she adds, "When the food bank is low, you don't get much -- a package of hot dogs, fruit pudding, juice drinks, which don't help because I'm a diabetic, jello and soup, maybe some cereal.
"And maybe some salami," adds Kalloch with a wicked smile, "which is real good for you because you need to keep that cholesterol going."
Kalloch is actually one of the relatively lucky ones in Maine, as long as a costly disaster doesn't strike. Her housing costs are low because she rents from her son, which leaves a little more money for food.
Others aren't so fortunate.
Consider the elderly woman in rural Jefferson whom Suzanne Kearns visited a few weeks ago.
"It was so pitiful, she was sitting by her chair, with her door open. I got there and she had nothing, nothing to eat, just sitting there very lonely, almost with a blank stare," says Kearns.
Kearns works as a nutrition administrator for Senior Spectrum in Augusta, which provides Meals on Wheels for seniors. She was making a delivery that day because the regular volunteer couldn't do it.
"Someone walking in would think maybe this woman has some form of dementia," says Kearns, who says the woman simply sat at the table, silent and glassy-eyed. "But it could be a vitamin deficiency." Among low-income seniors, she says, "poor nutrition is very prevalent and it can really mimic a lot of illnesses."
State Bureau of Health Director Dora Anne Mills agrees. "There are some specific nutritional deficits that the elderly are susceptible to," she says. "Vitamin B12, B6 deficiencies, for people who eat a lot of food out of a can, can actually mimic Alzheimer's and senility -- when sometimes they simply have vitamin deficiencies."
The face of hunger in Maine is varied. It's elderly people who pay so much for rent, heating, gas and medicine that there's not enough left every month for nutritious food. It's young families with parents who, between them, hold down three or four jobs, but need to frequent food pantries and soup kitchens to get the food they need. It's veterans like the 85-year-old man in western Maine who doesn't want to be identified.
"I just barely make it," the veteran says in a whisper, his red-rimmed eyes squinting in the bright light from his kitchen window. "There's a lady from the food pantry who brings ... all kinds of stuff, once a month, cereals and soups and all that stuff. If they didn't bring it to me, I'd just have to get by best I can."
"Best I can" for this elderly veteran is a refrigerator filled with two eggs, a few bottles of salad dressing, some margarine and a packet of baloney that belongs to a young man who is staying in the house for a few days. There's a little cereal in the pantry, too.
The veteran's son says, "He doesn't get the food he needs, he's missing a lot of different vitamins ... Right now he has enough food for another couple of days, he's down pretty close."
While the veteran accepts his predicament with a kind of detached resignation, that's not his son's attitude.
"My father's worked hard in his life, he's served his country, he doesn't ask for nothing and he deserves a lot better than he's got," he says.
What would he say to someone who doesn't believe there's real hunger in Maine?
"If they haven't seen this kind of life," says the son, "they're one lucky person."
NEXT MEAL MAY NOT COME
The federal government calls hunger by another name these days: "food insecurity."
There are degrees of food insecurity, ranging from severe to intermittent. But in the end, what the new term describes is a situation in which it is unclear where your next meal is going to come from. For some, that means real hunger and malnutrition; for others, it's a less critical but always challenging and ultimately debilitating and humiliating struggle to get food.
"Before I came here, it was a choice between feeding the dog, feeding myself and the medicine. And I always gave in to the dog, she was defenseless," says 62-year-old Kathleen Brown of Fairfield. Brown's sitting in the musty meeting room of an old Catholic school in Fairfield; the town's food pantry is just a few doors down the hall.
Brown's disabled; she has schizophrenia. She gets $800 a month in disability payments from Social Security. Her rent takes half of that, she says, and by the time she's met all her other fixed costs -- rent, heating, insurance -- Brown has "a little over $300 to pay bills on and I don't have any money left over for food ...
"I didn't even tell my folks I was going hungry, I didn't believe in asking anyone for help, you're supposed to stand on your own," she says, sighing. But eventually, things got so bad she turned to the food pantry.
"If it weren't for the food pantry, I'd go hungry."
In a national survey of food pantry clients, 47 percent said that during the previous year, they had chosen at least once between paying for food and paying for utilities or heating fuel. Thirty-six percent said they'd had to choose between paying for food and pay the rent or mortgage; 34 percent said they'd had to choose between paying for food and paying for medicine or medical care. Almost 20 percent said they'd been faced with all three situations.
For the last six years, the Rotary Club of Augusta has done its part to help out families undergoing such hardships. During the school year, they've paid for dinner to be served three nights a week at the Lincoln School, just off of Western Avenue.
Their motivation was the awareness that half of the city's schoolchildren lived in families that were so financially strapped that they were eligible for free and reduced price lunch at school, with the majority of children qualifying for free lunches.
But where were they going to get dinner?
Rotary's answer was "Feed the Kids," a partnership between Rotary and the Augusta School Department that offers dinner to both children and their families, prepared by a professional chef from the school district. To date, 14,000 meals have been served over those six years.
One late afternoon this spring, chef Cindy Hudson was frantically racing among the Hobart mixers, colanders suspended from ceiling hooks, whisks, spatulas and tongs in the stainless steel kitchen at Lincoln School, preparing that evening's dinner as well as portions of the next evening's offerings.
"I'm making couscous, hams for tomorrow, getting mashed potatoes ready for tomorrow," Hudson says, almost out of breath. Tonight's meal includes stuffed chicken with broccoli and cheese, peas and garden salad, bread donated by Panera and Rice Krispy desserts.
"We had 12 people when I first started," says Hudson. "Now we average 25 to 36 and I've had up to 52."
As 5:30 rolls around, a line starts forming at the cafeteria serving counter. For anyone who thinks that soup kitchens are filled with the derelict and society's cast offs, this group defies that image.
LIKEYOURNEIGHBORS
They look just like your neighbors, probably because many of them are your neighbors. They're fathers in work clothes, mothers dressed for the office, children scrunching up their faces at the prospect of couscous, a Mediterranean pasta dish. These are are families with jobs and educations who simply can't make it all work.
"Before, it was pay bills or eat," says Angela Elliott, a mother of two who is here with her husband Eric, daughter Natasha and son Dylan. Eric works for an Augusta food distributor and Angela used to work for the state until the time she spent tending their son's medical disability made it impossible to keep her job.
"The economy is bad, you can't make ends meet," says Eric. "By the time you get finished paying for fuel and everything else, you can't find a decently priced place to rent. Makes it kind of hard to reach the American dream ... Here we are, trying to get ourselves to the point where we can own a home, the American dream, the white picket fence. Can't do it."
Why can't they do it? Terry Howell thinks she knows the answer. She's the head of the Midcoast Hunger Prevention Program, which operates both a food pantry and soup kitchen in Brunswick.
"We don't have jobs that pay a liveable wage," says Howell.
"We don't have enough affordable housing ... The food line item in every person's budget is one item that is not fixed, versus the car, heat and rent." In other words, says Howell, after you finish paying for housing costs and everything else that isn't negotiable, what you have left is your food money. "Need four new tires?" she asks. "There goes the food."
And, Howell adds, the safety net that includes food stamps and welfare "punishes you for trying to move ahead and get to a liveable wage." That's because if you're poor enough -- defined as less than $1,430 monthly gross income for a family of two, for example -- you can get food stamps.
Economists have pegged a statewide liveable wage for the breadwinner of a family of three at $19.35 an hour, yet for a family that size, the food stamp benefits get cut off at a gross wage of $10.38 an hour. How, asks Howell, can anyone get ahead? How can they afford enough food for their families?
They can't, says Harmonie Hagerman, an Augusta mother with two young children. Hagerman and her husband both work, but his job at a local sandwich shop and her jobs at the Lincoln School and the city of Augusta don't add up to enough money to cover their food costs.
"It's like climbing a landslide with children on your back," says Hagerman.
LOSS OF DIGNITY
Thousands of people in Maine don't know where their next meal is going to come from, how they're going to feed themselves or their children on top of heating their house, putting gas in their car and paying for their medicines.
For them to eat, to feed their children, to have the nutrition that by all decent and humane measures is their birthright, they must rely on a complex and fragile web of assistance, from government, family, churches and charities. The independence -- and thus pride -- that is an essential part of our national identity is not available to the hungry. Neither is dignity, for to be unable to feed yourself -- despite, in many cases, holding down multiple jobs -- is degrading and infantilizing. To be unable to feed your children is profoundly, primally humiliating.
You could say -- and some do -- that with the help of the government, food pantries and the legions of volunteers that staff them, we don't really have a hunger problem because hungry people's needs are taken care of by charity.
But do we really want to live in a country where a substantial percentage of our citizens are fed -- and barely adequately, if that -- only through the kindness of others? Is this the promise of America in the 21st century?
Tomorrow: Taking hunger out of the shadows.
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