Three area Catholic churches have the common goal of delivering summer lunches to children when school is out.
A small number of Holy Trinity Catholic Church parishioners make sandwich bags and bring the lunches to kids 18 years old and below living in a mobile home park within the shadow of Peachtree City.
Poverty there is crushing and an equal opportunity purveyor of misery, white, black and Latino about equally. This community is not unique within and bordering Peachtree City and Fayette County.
I have traveled throughout the United States and the third world; infrequently have I seen this extent of squalor and deprivation.
We are often welcomed into mobile homes to put the food in the residents’ refrigerators because the resident is disabled; generally the only object in there is the light bulb. It is hard to believe that we permit the existence of the hidden hungry. Often three generations live together. Shame on us.
I blend in even though I drive a 20-year-old Mercedes with Donald Trump and NRA bumper stickers. Residents give me the victory sign, children and adults alike, they know us and consider us their friends rather than foe. There are plenty of foes in a trailer park. They warn us that their off-leash agitated dogs “are mean and they bite.”
They don’t, as they too get their “summer lunch” of Milk Bones. The following weeks their tails are wagging, in anticipation of their treats.
I am personally derided often by those indignant for their inference of “political statements.”
I would like to work with them driving their Hillary and Bernie bumper-stickered summer lunch delivery cars there too. Wishful thinking?
These residents are apolitical; their aspirations are food, clothing and shelter.
However, we all know that they will be exploited for a short time in November for less than altruistic reasons. Once the elections are over, they will be cast aside once again back to their subsistence depravity.
Holy Trinity volunteer parishioners make and deliver the lunches to about 300 children on Mondays and Tuesdays.
St. Matthew’s and St. Gabriel’s deliver the other days. This is done strictly by volunteers who also financially support the program, with the help of other parish families.
$30 covers lunches for the entire summer for one child. We do not receive any church or government funding. Our ministry feeds those children who cannot get transportation to a Georgia school lunch site.
Perhaps a private/publicly funded initiative of food trucks could be deployed to these mobile home communities, so that the children will have easier access to food. Since most of the schools within our parishes’ boundaries are Title I, this might be cost effective. Or school buses could pick up the children and bring them to a lunch site.
We can put a rover on Mars but cannot effectively distribute food to every needy hungry child in the summer?
What happened to: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses … the wretched refuse of your teeming shore?”
Have we forgotten?
Our churches’ program is quite simple. At the beginning of the summer, before school lets out, each mobile home is canvassed to determine the number of children under 18 .
This determines the number of sandwiches, apples, other fruit, snacks, bottled water, etc. Whoever signs up gets lunch. Families may also sign up as the summer progresses.
Simple math: how many kids times $30 becomes our fund-raising goal. Most volunteers sponsor several children.
There are always hungry children following our cars wanting food. We only have enough sandwiches for those who signed up.
However, the drivers often “find” extra sandwiches to make sure that every hungry child and sometimes parents get lunch, as we sadly all know this might be their only meal for the day.
Sort of like the “multiplication of the loaves and fishes” lite.
I hope my missive stimulates some mutually constructive action for the remainder of summer 2016 and on to the summer of 2017.
Michael Velsmid
Peachtree City, Ga.
