Don't Forget (a chance to do a good deed)
Letter: Help our community be more food-secure
By Opelika-Auburn News Reader
Published: May 12, 2011
Saturday is the annual Letter Carriers’ Food Drive. It’s easy to participate: Put some nonperishable food items in a bag on Saturday, leave it by your mailbox and wait for your letter carrier.
The timing of the drive is particularly helpful, because while hunger relief organizations like to remind everyone that hunger has no season, there’s a bit of an extra bite to summer. More children need food during the summer because schools are closed and children who receive free or reduced-price lunches lose a meal.
When talking about hunger in America, we refer to the difficulty in obtaining sufficient food for their household. Some people find themselves skipping meals or cutting back on the quality or quantity of food they buy.
Every year when I work at the docks at the post office, helping unload food from mail trucks, I have the opportunity to talk with carriers about what they found on their routes. Each year I hear the same thing: that it isn’t the well-to-do neighborhoods where they find the bags of donated food by the mailboxes, but instead it is in the more marginal neighborhoods that they find generous bags.
It is in the low-income retirement communities, and it is from residents who look like they could use help themselves. These are the people who are very much aware that hunger does exist in our community and they know they could be one paycheck away from welfare, one sick child away from getting fired, one missed rent payment short of eviction … they can easily be reduced to a place of needing the safety net of donated food.
Terrible storm damage has added a whole new level of need to a state already struggling with food insecurity. Please join us in helping to feed those in need.
Martha Henk http://www2.oanow.com/news/2011/may/...re-ar-1836502/
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