Hungry and Hurting in South L.A------------------------------
“Children come in here, they see us eating something and they come up to us and ask us: Miss Streisand, can you make us a sandwich, can we eat some of your cookies?” she said.
The problem is especially bad with unemployed teen parents. Katie Burton runs two counseling centers dealing with anger management, family planning and parenting. She said that in desperate times, some of her teen parents have resorted to feeding babies with Kool-Aid instead of milk
“They come in and say ‘the baby is crying – we’ve gotta feed it something,’” she said, shaking her head.
-----------------------------------
Three days a week on East Vernon Avenue, people begin lining up as early as 6 a.m. to receive a ticket redeemable for a bag of free food. The earlier they come, the better their chances are of getting fresh foods, such as meat.
“Ms. Jackson always gives out the good stuff,” Emily Johnson said as she looked through her brown bag. “There’s bread, energy drinks, peanut butter, candy and turkey!” she exclaimed, with a smile on her face.
“I am going to boil that turkey, cut it up, make some cold turkey salad. You can make a whole lotta sandwiches with that turkey. And there’s candy in there for the kids too.”
Morgan, one of many people recently dealing with hunger, wasn’t so lucky. By the time her number was called, the pantry was all out of meat.
“I’m gonna have to make do with bread and chips,” she said. “It’s a new lifestyle – I am still struggling to learn the ropes, it’s really not an easy life to lead.”
It’s a life that many like Morgan never expected to live. Even in this relatively low-income community, food pantries and organizations, such as the Salvation Army, find themselves assisting college graduates who had steady jobs and even helped support these charitable organizations.
http://hungerincal.uscannenberg.org/?p=268Searching For Food In The Land Of Plenty“It seems like every month there’s more of us waiting for food,” said Joan Yeboah, a former electromechanical drafter on disability for a bad back, who recently learned she has cancer. She stood next to her car outside a Chico community center, now used as a staging area to give away USDA commodity foods, opening her trunk to display the day’s haul: two packs of walnuts, a box of Rice Krispies, three cans of fruit, two boxes of milk, a jar of peanut butter, some cheese, and a can of beef stew.
“My daughter has a master’s degree in teaching and can’t get a job,” she said, blaming the state cuts in education for her family’s predicament. “Most of my income goes to housing, which leaves me $72 a month to live on. We’ve gone through our savings; I’ve gone through my 401k. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for my cancer treatment. It’s sort of fruitless. We don’t have a strategy. I have no idea what we’re going to do.
“We pray a lot.”
http://hungerincal.uscannenberg.org/?p=694Struggling Food Banks: A Slideshow http://hungerincal.uscannenberg.org/?p=504Mendota: A Town On The Edge
Mendota, a small agricultural town in central California, has long struggled with poverty and food insecurity. But record high unemployment, drought and a water crisis have worsened their plight, forcing residents to resort to selling scrap metal and doing odd jobs to scrape together money for survival in these hard times.----------------
Manuel Corez, 45, has been unable to find a job for the past year and is now homeless. He lives with two other people in a makeshift shack that they built next to the water canal outside of the town center.
“I go hungry for three to four days, sometimes,” he said. “But, I’ve always managed to get help from people around me eventually.”
To get a little bit of extra cash or food, Corez waters a neighbor’s backyard or folds boxes at a nearby convenient store to be thrown away.
“They are nice enough to give me $5 or a beer and cigarettes,” he said.
---------------------------------------
When times get really tough, Corez goes to a local Chevron gas station in the evenings and asks for the leftovers that are going to be tossed out.
“I would help them clean up so that I can get some hotdogs that they are going to throw away,” he said.
However, the gas station’s manager commented that they have stopped giving out food out of fear that someone would get sick from it.
Corez showed off another recent prize: three cups of instant ramen and one bag of beans, courtesy of the local Catholic church, Our Lady of Guadalupe.
“I have to share this with the other people,” he said. “But it’s ok. When we help others, others will help us too.”
http://hungerincal.uscannenberg.org/?p=159
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
