AfricanKelli

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 I’ve been haunted by insomnia lately. This happens about once a year. I’ll go 3-4 weeks without a good night’s sleep, waking around 2 am for 2-3 hours at a stretch. Some nights I just lie there, rolling the day around in my head, like a bowling ball down an empty alley. Others, I read and heat up a bowl of leftovers. More dramatically, there are nights I scream into a pillow — annoyed I’ll once again stomp through the day with bags under my eyes and splintered patience.

Yesterday, I spent two glorious hours in an auditorium with the author Mary Karr. The event, sponsored by Lighthouse Writer’s Studio, was an interview of the author. Karr is best known for her memoirs and poetry. She is currently writing a TV series based on her life for HBO. (And revealed last night she briefly dated David Foster Wallace. Always fascinating when famous people knew each other when.)

I fell head over heels in love with the profane Texan after her rant on “decorative writing” —  that which is fancy to be fancy. She called out specific authors and said The New Yorker is largely to blame. Poems that have secret meanings, for example, are “bullshit.” She took the art of writing and put it in each person’s hands to take home with them, reassuring us that we — as folks who can read and love words — are just as capable of greatness as anyone else. In fact, we might be more likely to produce good work because we aren’t surrounded by fake intellectuals. And when comforting herself during a moment of publishing anxiety, she remembered, “Everyone writes a shitty book.”

To someone who once called her names in a letter, she told of writing the person back and saying, “You are right! I am those things. And guess what? You can’t hurt my feelings. You aren’t the first who has called me that and you won’t be the last.” Oh, the chutzpah!

It was her straight talk. Her basic clothing. Her love of swear words that would embarrass sailors. Her nonchalant aire describing turning down six figure offers for more memoirs because she “just didn’t feel like it right now.” It was her story of growing up in a poor Texan family at the intersection of crazy and drunk.

Her lack of pedigree never slowed her. In truth, it gave her the best material.

Last night I slept 10 hours straight.

~K

I attended a community meeting a couple weeks ago for an organization called Hunger Free Colorado. They are the lobbying arm of the Feeding America-fueled food banks in the state. They take direction from the five food bank leaders state-wide on what to lobby with local, state and federal officials to better meet the needs of hungry Coloradans.

In Arizona, the Association of Arizona Food Banks handles this responsibility. The director, Ginny Hildebrand, is a force to reckon with. She is savvy, kind and damn effective. I had a chance to go to Washington DC with her once on a lobbying trip and that woman moves mountains.

As a food pantry volunteer, I was interested to hear about the systemic changes that this organization is working on for the state. I’d noticed more and more families coming into the pantry who were seeking sustainable food assistance. I’ve had this nagging concern the system at hand is failing because our “emergency” food boxes were becoming routine.

Something is obviously broken, and I’m no expert in any aspect of the policial or practical system of getting food to hungry folk. That said, any volunteer would notice many of the families coming to the pantry are stuck in a “job of being poor.” It takes a lot of time to access most basic public health services to keep a family fed. This may include visiting a food pantry or more per week — which is typically an all day affair when you are on the city bus.

If you’ve ever spent a day in a food bank, you realize there are far too many ways things could be better.

For example, how about these statistics:

1. 1/4 of families in Colorado report not having enough food, via a Gallup poll
2. The typical recipient of “food stamps” (called SNAP in Colorado) are a family of 4 living on less than $12,000 per year.
3. The application for SNAP, until recently, was 26 pages long. On page 4, the applicant was asked if he/she spoke/read English. Apparently up until then, they were expected to intuitively know what they were being asked.
4. While more than $500,000,000 has been spent on Colorado’s SNAP and food assistance software system since 2004, it doesn’t work. The state of Maine spent $15,000,000 on theirs and it works fantastically. There is little political motivation here to change what exists, even though it doesn’t work and hunger experts testified to the fact beforehand, “because we don’t want to spend more money.”  (To me that’s like not repairing the navigation system in the Titanic because the deck furniture cost too much. The system isn’t sinking. It sunk.)
5. All this said and done, the average Colorado family is on SNAP for less than 10 months.

It is daunting and entirely overwhelming to consider lobbying political issues, and yet — we are bucket brigading a huge fire that will consume Colorado if we don’t stop to install a fire department instead. (Not my analogy — one I heard in the meeting that I thought was rather apt.) And so, we continue bucketing as fas as we can and somehow muster the spirit and energy to create bigger, better change that stops the fire from starting.

I have to believe the basic steps we — those who don’t need food assistance — can all take, no matter where we live, look a bit like this:

1. Invite a friend over with a similar passion, or grab your roommate/spouse, and visit your neighbors. Go to each door around the block and introduce yourself. Take mental notes. Chances are, 1 in 4 of those houses you visit are hungry.

2. Invite your neighbors over for a potluck/bbq. Make it welcoming for those who can’t bring food, and get to know who these folk are. Chances are, you won’t like them all. And chances are, you’ll really like some of them. With certainty, the type of change I’m encouraging requires having civil conversations with both and recognizing public health issues — like hunger — don’t discriminate.

3. Plant a garden. Harvest it for yourself, your neighbors and your community food pantry.

4. If you can give time, volunteer. If you want to give to the food pantry — give money. They can typically buy 10 times what the average consumer can with the same amount of money.

5. Vote. Talk to local, state and federal politicians about how hunger is influencing your neighborhood. Make it tangible with stories you’ve heard and your experiences. For those in Denver, the way to communicate with such officials can be found here,  here and here. 

~K

I volunteered recently with my food banking buddies at a local LDS cannery that donates to pantries. We were among some 60 volunteers to work on peach canning. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to work in a cannery, this may come to mind.

If you’ve ever wondered what you sing in your head the entire time you are volunteering with peaches, the correct answer is this. In other news, this is how peaches go from tree to can. In fact, I was the “man who put them in the can in the factory downtown. So eat peaches everyday.”

1. Suit up with other volunteers to watch silly safety video.

2. Hope you get assigned to a cool job.

3. Smile even when you don’t get to play with the food, thankful this isn’t your day job.

4. Take lots of photo breaks, claiming you are “union.”

5. Spend a lot of time thinking about John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” and the characters who canned fish in “Snow Falling on Cedars.” Realize you’ve read way more about manual labor than you’ve ever experienced. Rejoice. Go home, bake a pie, be thankful you have both food and a cushy job.

~K

Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.

Henry David Thoreau

I’ve found a great group of like-minded community friends in Denver who get together a couple times a month to talk about social justice issues. In particular, hunger. We are all volunteers at a local food bank and are reaching out to other food banks and community groups to organize events to encourage similar opportunities to have conversation.

It seems there is a considerable lack of civil conversation these days. I’d guess our inability to disagree with each other without calling names or raising our voices and other notable lapses of basic manners are linked to our strained sense of community. Once we become comfortable not bothering to know our neighbors — much less help care for them — it is far easier to let the door swing shut in the stranger’s face behind us. Flip someone off in traffic. Roll your eyes at the overwhelmed mother struggling with her children. Look the other way when you see someone being abused, or going hungry.

And so, I call baloney. Baloney to anyone who says that is the type of community you want to live in. Baloney to those who say we can’t do something to change this. And baloney to those who laugh at the “naive” and “innocent” energies of those who want to create serious social change. While it may be easier to dismiss those around you trying to do something, we aren’t going to do any good from the comfort of the couch.

Coming together with folks who want to see their community strengthened is rad. I love hearing the wild and varied ideas for events and passions everyone brings to the table. We are all interested in improving the ability of this food pantry to reach those who are hungry in metro Denver. Yet fundamentally, we are more troubled by the social failings that has the queue in the front door snaking farther down the sidewalk each week.

How do we fix poverty? How do we get our neighbors to care about their community? How do we reverse social involvement apathy? By inviting more friends to the conversation, spending more time getting to know clients of the food pantry, investing a bit of money in local charities who are doing sustainable work for long-term change and reviewing and advocating for policy.

And perhaps most important: being willing to listen to varied voices. I spent time yesterday with a self-described “radically right conservative” who leads a food bank in northern Colorado. He was one of the most well-spoken, compassionate people I’ve ever heard talk about hunger. And he had some fantastic ideas that would have likely been brushed under the rug by this “all loving” liberal who obviously has some work to do on her pigeon-holed views.

I’m this fired up after one happy hour. Oh, dear Denver. Tempe should have given you a heads up about my crazed, focused, overly-optimistic ways.

To a hunger-free, socially-just infinity and beyond!

~K