Facing a painful reality
Picture for a moment cardboard cartons spread out in perfect rows so long and numerous that they stretch end to end and side to side in a huge church hall.
That’s how The First Congregational Church’s Roland Thatcher Hall in Wareham looked Sunday, as volunteers for the Community Resource Network (CRN) prepared 250 Thanksgiving food cartons to be delivered to needy families in Buzzards Bay, Marion, Rochester, Onset and Wareham.
The 250 cartons of food still aren’t enough to provide for all the families in need. In a painstakingly coordinated effort, a number of organizations, including, the Lion’s Club, Marion VFW Post #2425, and churches in each of the towns, were packaging additional cartons for Thanksgiving distribution. And just a little further away churches and organizations in Mattapoisett were packaging food cartons for families there as well.
A sea of cartons for a sea of faces. This is the reality we sometimes do not want to face: There are families in your town, neighbors not far from where you live, children who go to school with your children, elderly, people you see in stores, who can’t afford a Thanksgiving Dinner.
There are people living among us that face a reality that most of us can’t imagine. The Thanksgiving distribution isn’t about turkey and potatoes and peanut butter. It’s about people. It’s about the faces of those who await these food cartons, faces of hope and fear and desperation.
These cartons are covered with hope, with messages from local Brownies, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. Row after row of turkeys and tulips and rainbows surrounded simple messages of love and compassion.
"Be safe."
"We think about you every day."
"Eat until you are full."
Across the driveway in Wareham’s First Congregational Church, children took turns at an altar of thanks, reading essays they had written about the meaning of this holiday. There was great wisdom in their words, wisdom that forced the adults in the audience to reflect on their blessings. A young mother, a small child beside her, read from an essay about her family losing the home they rented because of a foreclosure.
Where do all the foreclosure families go? What is it like to know you can never enter your home again? What is it like to have nothing but memories? Yahoo’s real estate page, currently lists approximately 30 homes under foreclosure in Buzzards Bay, Marion, Mattapoisett, Rochester and Wareham. Those are real people. Those are real faces. They are not just numbers.
On that same day at Old Rochester Regional Junior High School. Principal Kevin Brogioli beamed the biggest smile that pride can bring. Brogioli watched seventh and eighth grade students volunteering on a Sunday. He saw them escort seniors one by one from the school entrance down a hallway to a cafeteria filled with a Thanksgiving celebration. Volunteers served cider, dinner plates mounded with food, and golden slices of apple pie while a teacher, accordion in his hands, strolled among tables encouraging a sing along.
There were 125 door prizes, gifts donated by area business, waiting between decorative straw scare crows. And when it was over a slew of other students cleaned the tables and scrubbed the pots and pans.
The voice of an adult volunteer brought a moment of reflection. Some of the students don’t have grandparents, she noted. It’s good for the students to see the seniors, to see what it takes for some of them just to walk a distance that the students consider to be short.
In the cafeteria one senior paused to offer her own reflection. Some of these young people don’t have grandparents, she said. It’s good for them to see what we’re like.
These are people. These are faces. These are the people who live among us.
And they are very, very real.
