November 3, 2010

I’ve just published an article in one of my other blogs: “Ah, but that’s another story”. It seems unnecessary to completely write another piece, so I have included it below.

Today brought lots of pain. I am certainly not catching my rhythm this week. I guess that’s to be expected, but I don’t expect it! I find it frustrating and worry creating. Am I really as well as it seemed yesterday?

Well, time will tell won’t it! In the meantime I am just simply in the journey.

Here is the story I wrote for my other blog.

Mind Boggled Again

Well, this is another story related to the Daily Bread Food Bank. I don’t mean to pick on them. This particular food bank is the source of an important resource to me at this time. We are related. But, it’s a very one sided relationship, it seems. I have not yet figured out a way that I can enter into a genuine dialogue with this complex and mysterious organization.

The context for me is that I have been bed ridden for a full month – October to November 3. Because some will be curious let me just say that I have succumbed to a complex set of reactions to medication, etc due to the fact I have been in quite a lot of pain for over a year.

One of the factors which is quite relevant to this story is that stress leads to pain leads to stress. For just over a year I have been learning, as readers of this blog know, to live on the ODSP benefit in a neighbourhood which initially was not of my choosing. This situation has been stressful and so is a factor in my current physical condition.

So, today, feeling a little bit stronger I went off to the food bank. I haven’t been there for over a month and my assistant and I were clearly missed by some of the regulars. That is kind of comforting in itself! I have often found over the years that I usually enjoy hanging out with poor and marginalized people partly cause their quirkiness eases any discomfort I might have about my own and partly because these people are very reliable sources of good information about where the real barriers are and what some of the tricks are.

This particular food bank has undergone a major reorganization in my absence. According to the signs it is intended to be a temporary change of operations. Pardon me, but I have my doubts!

The immediate obvious effect of this reorganization is that all the waiting patrons were crammed into a very tiny area and it would seem that there was only one person available to process the waiting people so that they would get their ticket and be able to move onto the food selection area. The food selection area has become nothing more than a line-up to hand out bags of food as there was no room available to lay out the selections as in the previous manner.

I never actually got to the point where somebody could hand me a couple of bags of food. I actually went to the food bank twice today and left empty handed both times. The first time I went I waited approximately 40 minutes and not even 1 person made it through from the waiting area to the food distribution area. The second time, the waiting line was even longer and I didn’t bother to try to get through.

Now I’m sure you realize that I have the luxury of deciding to not use the food bank this week. I have many friends and a full freezer because last week was my birthday and I was sick and lots and lots of people brought food. Today’s trip was more in an effort to broaden the selection of food available to me as much of what’s in the freezer is sweet stuff – not really suitable to my diabetic diet. Be that as it may I have the privilege of waiting till Friday to find out if the food bank has figured out how to process people more effectively.

My real message here is: “What is the point of processing people, at least under these difficult circumstances”. Everybody’s going to get exactly the same food selection in exactly the same two bags. The food that’s going to be there this week is there already. Out of the hundreds of people who will use this support this week surly not more than one or two would be nuts enough to line up more than once to get double their allotment for this week. What possible purpose can it serve to force dozens of people to wait for hours?

I hope you realize just what sort of people are waiting, and that you can get a sense of just how much stress can build up in this kind of situation. The gentleman who welcomed me to the line-up in the first place has all the physical signs of living with psychosis which is controlled by medication which gives him speech and body tics. Another person down the line is a mother with a 3 year old waiting without even a single toy to play with, surrounded by mainly single men. This is not an ideal situation by anybody’s stretch of the imagination for a young child. Others are among the classically unemployable, who wile away their time either sullenly sitting in silence or talking to each other about how such and such a training program never really led them to employable status, etc, etc.

A naïve observer would perhaps conclude that the main activity of poor people in our society is to wait. My heart aches for the 3 year old who is already becoming well acquainted with this job description.

I’m not actually the huge rabble rouser that I would like to be in this kind of situation. Today it was easy to see that all that was required was for someone to break through the line and start handing out bags to each person. Bag by bag, person by person, the waiting line would have been dispersed in less than 20 minutes with no harm done to anyone, especially the Ontario government. But I didn’t do it and neither did anyone else. We are after all good citizens of Ontario.