Following is a link to a moving, well written article about feeding hungry children in Tennessee. As a crow flys, the area is only twenty minutes away and I occasionally go trout fishing on the river that runs through the area, so this hits home.
From The Washington Post:
In parts of rural Tennessee, children depend on a free lunch program to offer what is, for many of them, the only reliable meal of the day.
It was the first day of summer in a place where summers had become hazardous to a child’s health, so the school bus rolled out of the parking lot on its newest emergency route. It passed by the church steeples of downtown and curved into the blue hills of Appalachia. The highway became two lanes. The two lanes turned to red dirt and gravel. On the dashboard of the bus, the driver had posted an aphorism. “Hunger is hidden,” it read, and this bus had been dispatched to find it.
According to the article, more than 1 in 4 children in Tennessee now depend on government food assistance, a record level of need.
Just up the hills from northeastern Tennessee in our highlands of NC, poverty rates hover near twenty percent, too; and like their political brethren in DC, our local county governments ignore the problem. In fact, our Republican controlled county commissioners have refused--since they took control three years ago--to support our excellent Hospitality House which houses the poor and provides free meals daily.
A 5-year-old girl saw the dust trail of the bus and pedaled toward it on a red tricycle. Three teenage boys came barefoot in swimsuits. A young mother walked over from her trailer with an infant daughter in one arm and a lit cigarette in the other. “Any chance there will be leftover food for adults?” she asked.
I'm not up to speed on the poverty problem and I really don't want to get in the way of this powerful article, it is a must read.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
I will share this experience about early childhood education. The director of a nearby county award-winning program that has endured roughly a 50 percent cut in state support over the past ten years and is expecting more cuts from our rethug legislature this year told me that the books they provide the toddlers in their precious red book-bags are the only books found in many of the homes.
Steinbeck would not be proud of us for letting this poverty of the mind and body endure.
Perhaps, you could forward this article to your congresscritters before they decimate food stamps.
It was almost 1 p.m. For some, this would be the first meal of the day. For others, the last.
~my emphasis~