Via de Esperanza

Friday is food pantry day. It’s a day I hate because I need the food pantry, which makes it all the more despicable to me. I’ve been sort of riding on fumes and making due and all those other euphemisms we use when we don’t have enough. But we *do* have enough. We just don’t have enough of what we want.

“There’s no kid food in this house!” my eight-year old scolded me.

“Yeah, there is. There’s peanut butter. Jelly. Cheerios. Cheez-Its.”

“I can’t have Cheez-Its. And I can’t have cereal without my special milk.” My kid is lactose intolerant, the curse of computer geeks and the bookish. She needs lactose-free milk and those special pills. They’re expensive and sometimes I don’t get to the big supermarket that carries them.

So I was overdue for the food pantry. I stalled all morning. It’s cold, I told myself, too cold to wait in line. I’ll just go to the regular supermarket and buy the bare necessities. But if I go to the food pantry from week to week, I end up with the bare necessities (sugar, flour, canned goods, rice, beans, peanut butter), and I can afford things like bread, milk, eggs, and lactose-free milk. Chef-Boyardee ravioli. Pancake syrup. Garbage bags. Shampoo. Strawberries.

I dashed out at the last minute, figuring if I made it, it would be Providence. You’re supposed to call the food pantry in advance and get a number, but I can never get through. If you get a number, you show up at 12:30 and you get the first round of what is available. If you don’t get a number, you have to come at 1:15 and take what’s left. The volunteers have it packed up in bags, and you just say your first name and how many adults and how many kids in your household. Via de Esperanza is a lifesaver, because they don’t hassle you or make you feel bad for coming to the food pantry. The people who work there are a mixture of Spanish-speaking and English-speaking. Most of the people who come for food are Spanish-speaking. It’s the only place in the area that lets you come every week. I’m not kidding. Like you don’t get hungry from week to week or something. Or like one box of food is going to solve all your problems.

I first asked for help with groceries by e-mail from someone at my church. I was mortified when, instead of responding to my e-mail, he forwarded it to about five different people with the comment, “hey, this lady needs some help with food for her family, can anybody out there refer her to the right place?”

I mean, really. The e-mail had my first and last name on it. Was that necessary?

Someone from the Grace church responded directly to me, saying, “come by, we’ll give you a food basket.” It was late November, and it was starting to get cold. They gave me mittens for me and the kids and a cardboard box filled with canned goods and cereal, toilet paper, toothpaste, stuff like that. It helped. At that same church, you can go by on Thursday afternoons and pick up day-old bread for free. Panera, the trendy sandwich place, drops off those giant loaves of pannini and focaccia, which is kind of nice. You can also get regular store bread on Friday, but you have to go after 2:30, which is hard for me because I work.

Anyway, by January, even with the stuff from Via de Esperanza and the bread from Grace, I was having trouble. The heating bills were killing me. I had to put my kids in daycare and I couldn’t make the mortgage. I went back to Grace and asked for another food basket. They said they couldn’t give me any more help because they had already helped me in November. I was kind of stunned. They suggested that I call the Salvation Army or Catholic Charities.

Now, I was at work, mind you, and I didn’t want anyone to overhear. I don’t have a cell phone. But I’ll do anything for my kids. So I called Catholic Charities from my cubicle.

When you come in, they told me, you need to give us two recent pay stubs as proof of income. We need copies of your bills to prove your particular hardship or documentation which explains why you need assistance. We need the Social Security numbers for everyone living in the house. And also proof of residency in the town.

Proof of hardship?

My husband moved out. We get no monetary support from him.
I work, but because I was crying at my desk every day, I got demoted, with an $11,000 pay cut.
I have two small kids, and day care costs me $800 a month.
It’s $70 a week to fill my car with gas.
Lettuce costs like $2.50 a head, strawberries $5.99.
I don’t have any family here to help me.

Is that proof enough? Is it hardship enough?

Suddenly I felt like Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes. Should I start stealing french fries from drunken soldiers? Bananas from the produce market? It just didn’t seem worth it. Anyway, I hung up from her, knowing that I wouldn’t go to Catholic Charities. I was raised Catholic, too. Man, that hurt.

Who put these people in charge of deciding who deserves charity and who doesn’t?

Since when is food a privilege?

When I lived in Mexico, the crowd I used to hang with would get drunk and curse the rich. It was something of a hobby, a little bit of an obsession. They sang sad songs and slapped each other on the back, always ending the evening with two or three of them around the kitchen table, drinking tequila and arguing how “la comida es un derecho.” Food is a right, they would shout as they pounded the table. De acuerdo, claro que si.

They knew what they were talking about.

I made it on time to Via de Esperanza. There was even someone who came after me, so I wasn’t dead last. Something tells me that even if I had been too late, they would have found a bag to give me. While I stood apologizing to the director, the volunteers filled my basket with six sacks of groceries. I didn't even notice they were doing it; they all descended on me like a swarm of Mexican mommies. The haul varies from week to week, but it is always useful stuff. No sockeye salmon or hominy grits. I was really happy to see a bottle of canola oil, which I have needed for a while. You can’t cook without oil.

“Thanks, I really needed vegetable oil,” I told the lady.

“Oh good,” she said, smiling. “Sometimes you hit it just right.”

I hurried off with my basket of groceries, shoved them into the back seat of my car. Suddenly I felt relieved. It wasn’t that bad. Nobody made me feel like a jerk or a rotten mother for needing help. And there was apple juice in one of the bags! My four-year-old loves apple juice. Apple-dee-juice, she calls it.

Via de Esperanza is kind of a garage church. I wondered how they worship. Via de Esperanza. Path of Hope, I think.

As I drove off, this Scripture came to mind:

Then the king will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.'

Then the righteous will answer him and say, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?'

And the king will say to them in reply, 'Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.'

Matthew 25: 34-40 (NAB)

I don't think it gets any clearer.