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Sandra and Her Children
Connecticut
is one of the richest states in the Union. So how come so many families are
going hungry?
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By SUSAN CAMPBELL
Courant Staff Writer
Sandra Davis is slumped in a chair at
Earlier, Sandra and I were at a meat market in
On the way to
"If I sit down, I am not going to get up. I got to feed my family,"
she says, as she pushes out of the car. She stands, then bends, and vomit
splatters onto the pavement.
Inside the store, she leans on the cart like a walker, and after she orders
hamburger from a butcher, she ducks into a bathroom. When she returns, a tear
leaves a shiny track down her right cheek. She has to go home. She'll pick up
her two youngest from school, and then she'll take a bus to the hospital, as
she's done more and more frequently in the past few years.
But she's sick, I tell her. She needs to see a doctor.
OK. Then she'll drop the meat off at her second-floor walk-up in
But she's really sick, I say. She needs a doctor. I convince her to let me drop
her at St. Francis. She shuffles through the automatic doors and I race to her
apartment to bang on the door until her friend, a woman named Pat, lets me in.
We muscle the unwieldy boxes of meat and the brick of cheese up the stairs and
into the refrigerator and freezer. It is the first of the month, what some
When I drive back to the hospital, Sandra is hunched over a small,
kidney-shaped container nearly filled with a yellow, bubbly liquid.
Sandra Davis, 31, was diagnosed with diabetes at age 19. Because she didn't
treat her diabetes properly, doctors say she now has gastroparesis. A nerve
that stimulates muscles to move food through her digestive track has stopped
working. Most likely, it won't start again. Earlier this month, a surgeon
inserted a tube into her stomach, through which she takes a liquid diet. For
years, Sandra has been going back and forth from home to hospital complaining
of pain, nausea and gas. The feeding tube is the doctors' last-gasp measure to
alleviate her pain, but it hasn't worked.
A significant part of Sandra's bad health comes from her bad diet. If we are
what we eat, the poor such as Sandra are highly processed, starchy and fatty
foods. It's what's cheap. It's what's close by, and it hurts all of us.
* * *
At Sandra's home, the father of her middle child helps out, but mostly, the
responsibilities are Sandra's. She wants to be a nurse, but she's too sick to
attend school so the family's current economic situation is static. She feeds
her family on $436 in federal food stamps a month. When the cupboard is bare,
the family walks to a soup kitchen or food pantry, organizations that are
dependent on hand-outs from corporations and neighbors.
If she could afford it, Sandra says, she'd buy decent food. Instead, more often
she serves things fried and processed, and the family washes it down with cheap
sugar water marketed as juice.
What else is she going to do?
There is hunger, and there is food insecurity. The latter occurs when there
aren't good-quality grocery stores nearby, or enough food to purchase for
everyone in the household, or freedom to choose favorite foods. The former is
the physical symptoms of going without food. The United States Department of
Agriculture says there are 100,000 people hungry statewide, and a
quarter-million who are "food insecure."
Sandra and her children are both.
Every month, $436 is automatically deposited into an account with Sandra's name
on it. She has a swipe card with which she can deduct money to buy food.
Because she has no car, transportation is iffy. The bus line is not far from
her house, but she shops for six people, and carrying that much food on the bus
would be difficult, if not impossible. Her grandmother - her mother's mother -
has a car, but she's not always able to give Sandra a ride. Most often, Sandra
pays exorbitant prices for rides from acquaintances who own cars. Just before
school started, Elaina Papachristos, Mercy Housing & Shelter Corp. case
manager, gave Sandra $50 in Wal-Mart gift certificates to buy clothes for her
children. To get a ride to the store, Sandra had to give the woman who drove
her half the certificates.
* * *
`We must remember that the United States is one of the richest countries in the
world, and that Connecticut is one of the richest states in the Union,"
says Wendy L. Rayack, Wesleyan University associate professor of economics.
"To have children going hungry in this state is, above all, immoral.
The long-term effects of hunger on children are huge. Hungry children cannot
learn, says Rayack. They are ill more often, and they miss school. Teachers in
urban areas have learned to stock their desks with crackers to tide the
children over until they can get their free lunches. Frequent school absences
cause developmental delays, and bad nutrition delivers severe, long-term
medical conditions. Rayack says every dollar spent fighting hunger saves $5
down the road.
The health problems of Sandra Davis' family are enormous. In addition to
Sandra's digestive problems and diabetes, truth be told, if she had adequate
health care, a doctor would most likely treat her for depression. John, 15, is
overweight and borderline-diabetic. Kriss, 11, is overweight and was born with
a heart murmur. Shaquille, 9, is hard of hearing, and loath to wear a hearing
aid. Monasia, 7, has asthma. Like her siblings, Danilia, 16, is learning
disabled and requires extra help in school, but Sandra is quick to show a thick
file of her children's school attendance awards. One day, she's going to frame
them and put them on her wall, when she can afford the frames.
"All of them do really good in school," says Sandra. "That's one
thing that gets me by every day."
As her mother speaks, Na-Na smiles from the couch. When asked, she says her
boyfriend's name is "Books." She's in school to learn.
* * *
Lorraine Reardon is a registered nutritionist with
"You automatically assume it's their eating habits, but it could be a
thyroid condition and they don't have money for prescriptions," Reardon
said. "They have a very limited food choice. I am dealing with what they should
eat, but they sometimes don't know where their next meal is coming from."
John Frassinelli, Department of Public Health nutrition consultant, agrees.
"I am sometimes talking to someone about improving their nutrition when
their concern is `How am I going to get enough food when I run out of
money?'" he said. "It's tough."
* * *
Sandra lives on a street with a graveyard at one end, and the ghetto at the
other. She doesn't let her children outside after
"We all want our kids to be happy," said Frassinelli. "Maybe we
can't get them the latest Disney backpack to send to school, but maybe we can
give them a little something to make them happy. We talk a lot about
appropriate snacks. It's not fair to suggest that those families don't have the
same concerns that you and I do. They care about quality of life, a future for
their kid. They have the same issues, in addition to concerns about feeding
their children, and the guilt associated with not being able to do that."
Ramon Rojano,
"Capitalism won the fight," he says, walking through
The streets are a big part of the discussion in
"Figure out what's happening in north
The Washington-based Food Research and
Last summer,
On this summer day, Gloria Smith is handing out today's lunch - turkey and
cheese sandwich, 2 percent milk, fruit. She raised all six of her children in
"How are you, baby?" she asks as a squat young boy in a Phillies tank
top comes in. "Yeah, they know Miss Gloria. I love it. That's why I am
still in here."
Lunch programs in school and out are important these days because many parents,
with welfare options closed to them, are working two and three low-paying jobs,
Rojano said.
Although the food is meant strictly for the children, recently a pregnant woman
came into
* * *
We don't talk about class in
But that's presuming the playing field is level. This is the trajectory of
Sandra's life:
In and out of foster homes while her mother battled a cocaine addiction. No
relationship with her father. Some of Sandra's foster homes were legally sanctioned.
Sometimes, she just wandered into a family that would feed her for a while.
Time spent in a group home at Warehouse Point. She played basketball there. It
was maybe her happiest time.
Pregnancy at 14. Motherhood at 15, when she dropped out of high school.
Motherhood again at 16 and at 19, when she was diagnosed with diabetes.
Another child at 22 and a fifth at 24. Reported to Department of Children and
Families the same year after her children missed school when the family moved a
lot.
Homeless at 26 with five kids aged 1 through 10.
Moved to Florida at 29, then back to Connecticut.
Homeless again at 29 when the city condemned her family's apartment, into
emergency apartment, then to another apartment as permanent as any, at 30.
Through the intervention of Mercy's Papachristos, a West Hartford church paid
Sandra's first six months' rent. It also offered to pay the security deposit,
but Sandra said no. She wanted to pay that. Moved to a second apartment in
August, just in the nick of time. A week after the family's last move, someone
was shot in their old backyard.
"That's the good Lord looking out for me," says Sandra. "A
bullet doesn't have no name."
John has already been approached to sell drugs in the neighborhood. He said no,
and Sandra lavished him with praise. Privately, he says his mother is
protective, but he says to her, "You are supposed to protect."
And she says - in a low voice, while the children are sprawled on the floor
playing the card game, Uno: "They never think Mommy's short on money. They
don't know where the money is coming from. They don't think like that, and they
shouldn't have to."
Danilia has had jobs since she turned 16. This summer she worked at Hartford
Hospital, but Sandra is loath to take money from her.
"My daughter has to have a life," Sandra said. "She can't give
me help. She needs her life, too."
* * *
Of the Hartford residents who receive food stamps, roughly 2,000 receive the
minimum, $10 a month, according to End Hunger Connecticut!, a private education
and lobby organization.
But Suzette Strickland, who works for End Hunger on food stamp outreach, goes
into the community, anyway, to try to get people to apply. One February day,
Strickland sat at a Hartford elementary school, SAND Everywhere, behind a table
with a bowl of cookies that kept disappearing.
Her job isn't easy. One woman said she wants nothing to do with any entitlement
program. Strickland said that's pride and fear talking. She handed her business
cards out like candy.
"A lot of people at the elderly sites are in tears," Strickland said.
"I think it's unfair they have to work all their lives and now they get
just $10 a month." Strickland knows those tears. She applied for
assistance herself, years ago.
One woman was filling out a form for Strickland. She paused at the part that
asked her why she needed help feeding her family.
"Let's just put it on the table here," the woman said, looking at
Strickland. "I got too damn many mouths." The woman standing next to
her nodded and wrote that on her form.
* * *
When the city condemned her apartment a few years back, Sandra and her family
were homeless for three months. In the harsh light of a homeless shelter, a
woman with five children is hard to miss. Sandra caught the attention of
Mercy's Papachristos, who took Sandra from her emergency apartment to look for
something more permanent. Eventually, Sandra found a place on her own. State
funds through the Department of Social Services and Chris Wilson, Kriss'
father, help with the rent, but Sandra is approaching a limit on her DSS money.
It runs out next month.
"A case manager can only do so much," Papachristos said. "We try
to help them become self-sufficient, but you know what? She has a lot to do
with how much better off the family is now."
Sandra likes her second-floor apartment. The front room has a big bay window.
The kitchen is large. There's a backyard, and you can't hear the gunshots back
there. It is, compared to where she started, a wonderful home.
When Sandra was 15 and on the delivery table having her daughter, she cried out
in pain. She says a nurse looked down at her and said, "It didn't hurt
when it was going in."
That made Sandra so mad she pulled the nurse's hair, and then pretended it was
an accident. Didn't this woman know? A baby would give Sandra someone to love.
Her own mother, a heroine addict, ran a traveling shooting gallery in a series
of Hartford apartments. Before she died of AIDS at age 45, Sandra's mother took
in the poor off the street, but she couldn't organize her life around her three
children. Sandra sometimes relied on strangers for care.
"I was eating out of everybody's house," she said. "People I
didn't know fed me sometimes. It was a whole lot different, and I didn't want
my children to grow up in the environment I did."
Now, Sandra does what she can. She sits the boys down in front of her favorite
Lifetime movies and talks to them about the evils of domestic violence, and the
importance of fidelity to family.
* * *
Charter Oak's Reardon once took clients to Stop & Shop to show them the
tricks of effective grocery shopping, such as not paying attention to
advertisements' claims, and shopping the shelves higher and lower than
eye-level. As a reward for listening, she offered to buy her clients coffee from
the Dunkin' Donuts in the store.
"They all said they couldn't afford Dunkin' Donuts coffee," Reardon
said. "I swear to God, they were ready to cry."
Walking up an aisle at Wal-Mart, Sandra spies the brightly colored national
brands of detergents like Tide or Gain. "I wish I could afford this type
of stuff," she says, as she hefts a 96-load off-brand of detergent into
her cart. She shops like a champion. At Marshalls in Wethersfield, she spends
$97.94 and gets each boy a pair of jeans, a new shirt, and sneakers for John.
And then the woman at the cash register asks if she wants to give money to help
fight diabetes.
Sandra looks her in the eye and says, "I don't have it."
Later still, at Price Rite in Wethersfield, tempers flare in a parking lot that
seems to be forever full. Shoppers rent carts for 25 cents. A little boy is
pushing a cart past Sandra and she asks, "Are you through with that?"
and the boy says, "Do you got a quarter?" Inside, the store charges
11 cents a bag for shoppers.
Sandra bags Granny Smith apples and grabs a 20-pound bag of potatoes. Fresh
produce is a must, but you can't keep fresh produce for a month. She pulls down
eight boxes of sugared cereal, Fruity Pebbles, Cocoa Puffs. She adds to that
two gallons of corn oil, 48 tight pillows of bagged ramen noodles, two dozen
eggs, two big bags of animal crackers, three loaves of bread, canned corn,
canned beans, 24 cans of tuna.
"Make sure I get fresh eggs," she says. "Where we get them
around the corner? They was no good. They were tangy-tasting."
* * *
Chris Wilson, known by his boyhood nickname of Bump, works a day job at
Hartford Hospital, then comes to the house with money for sneakers and food.
The fathers of Sandra's other four children are frequently in jail. They're
bums, she says. She once told John, "The only thing you learned from your
father is how to be a deadbeat dad."
And John, tender-hearted and loyal to his family, answered quietly, "He
didn't teach me that."
Evenings and weekends, Wilson runs Har-Town Recordings on Albany Avenue.
Occasionally, he'll rent a car for a family outing. Sometimes, he'll take John
and Kriss with him there to work. Sometimes, he'll go there alone, to escape
the noise. All the kids call him dad. He's over a lot.
"I try to be a male figure for my sons," says Bump. "I was
always taught family is first. You stay with your family. That's a problem a
lot of guys out there have."
Bump met Sandra in high school. Sandra was big, loud and funny, and Bump was
intimidated. Plus, she already had two children. Sandra says now she was an
angry kid "looking for love in all the wrong places."
"I would tell these young mothers now: I love my kids, but I wouldn't have
had my kids at an early age," Sandra says. "Before you lay down to
have a baby, think about how you are going to feed your kids. If I have one
bean in my house, I am going to split that bean five ways."
She asks Danilia, "Do you want to grow up like me?" Danilia's reply:
"I am going to college and bring my degrees back to you."
Sandra sometimes wonders what it would be like to be married. She brings the
subject up to Bump, who sidesteps it. But during her 14 hospitalizations this
past year, it's been Bump who's stayed with the children, with frequent visits
from Sandra's grandmother, and mighty effort on the part of the children. When
their mother is in the hospital, Na-Na reminds Shaq to wear his hearing aid.
Shaq reminds Na-Na to be polite. John wakes everyone up in time for school.
He's said he doesn't want to go away to college, when the time comes. He wants
to stay home and care for his mother.
* * *
Shelters and food pantries were meant to be temporary. Twenty years ago in
Hartford, Mark Winne, who recently stepped down as executive director of
Hartford Food System, remembers only a handful of local anti-hunger
organizations.
But something happened, writes Janet Poppendieck, author of "Sweet
Charity: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement." Society began to see
food pantries and shelters as necessary evils - and so we gave tacit agreement
that there would be hunger in this country. These days, there is the Hartford
Food System, Foodshare, End Hunger Connecticut!, and that's a partial list of
organizations specifically devoted to hunger relief. Add to that list Hispanic
Health Council, Connecticut Association for Human Services, and a host of
others. Recently, First lady Laura Bush has appeared in television commercials
for America's Second Harvest, the country's largest hunger-relief organization.
Get involved, she says, but that moves those involved in hunger relief to ask:
What about the government's involvement?
"What does the state care about?" asks Lucy Nolan, End Hunger
Connecticut! executive director. "The state does education, but in
partnership with the federal and local governments. The federal government does
defense. The state, as far as I can see, should be helping those who can't take
care of themselves. And frankly, the state doesn't do that much. If I give
somebody a jar of peanut butter, that's not going to solve it."
A forklift putters down a long aisle at Foodshare's Windsor warehouse. For 21
years, Foodshare Inc. is where agencies have come to get the food they'll
distribute in neighborhoods in Hartford and Tolland counties. Individual
clients don't come here, but clients are never far from the mind of Gloria
McAdam, president.
The USDA says we waste 28 percent of our food during production and
distribution. Mistakes are made. Stacked high are pieces of marketing disasters
such as blue applesauce. Years ago, a large company dropped off clam chowder
that had been accidentally dyed green.
"Finally, a group of nuns in Enfield was able to move it," McAdam
said. "They used it the entire month of March as St. Patrick's Day
chowder."
The warehouse has a bulletin board in the lunchroom. Employees are encouraged
to write good news there. When a Park Street mobile food site opened in July,
someone wrote that there were 128 people in line.
"I stood there and looked at it, and I thought, `This is good news?'"
McAdam said. "When people ask, `How are things at Foodshare?' I never know
how to answer that. If things are good at Foodshare, that means things are not
good in Connecticut. We grew 10 percent last year. Is that good? In 1982, we
sent out 63,000 pounds of groceries. That's three tractor trailers. Last year,
we sent out 8.2 million pounds of food. That's more than a tractor trailer
every week. Is that good news?"
The increase is due in part because local programs have made it easier for
people in need to seek food aid, McAdam said. Then, too, food is the most
flexible part of a family's budget. You can't fudge on the rent or utilities,
but you can scrimp on the food budget, and then try to make up the difference
at a local pantry.
In 1982, 26 organizations got food from Foodshare. Today, there are about 300,
McAdam said. Foodshare will distribute an estimated 9 million pounds of food
this year.
* * *
On a summer afternoon, John bounds down the stairs to go fishing with his
great-grandmother, who is outside waiting in her white car.
"Go tell her let me borrow $10, and see what she says," Sandra calls
after him.
He comes running back up.
"She said not today. Tomorrow."
Sandra throws herself back onto the couch to laugh.
"What did I tell you? What did I tell you?" she says.
Later, Monasia is at the corner market clutching a quarter in her hand. She
walks to the cash register, which is nearly hidden behind a wall of candy. She
lays her quarter on the counter, and points to two small Sugar Daddy suckers -
hardened caramel that will stick to her teeth and fingers - and a similar
square of sour taffy.
"Is that a quarter?" she asks.
The man nods. Monasia smiles, says, "Thank you" as she's been trained
to do, and walks out the door into the trash that blows up the street.
Most of us will never shop at Monasia's market, will never drive down her
street or sit down with her for a meal. And there's good reason. Shame and fear
are powerful boundaries.
"These points may be driven home when we realize how our own lives and
freedoms have been circumscribed by the consequences of our failure to
share," said Rayack. "As a result of our neglect, we may feel
uncomfortable in certain parts of our own Connecticut community. We may fear
for the safety of our children if they travel too freely in parts of our own
state. What does that tell us? In effect, we become prisoners of our own walled
communities. The walls are invisible, but they are there, and they cost us.
They cost us now and will cost us even more as time goes on."
At a bi-weekly food distribution service started in July at Immaculate
Conception shelter, the line starts a half-hour before the truck arrives.
There's another site on Park on alternating weeks, so every week, the people of
Park Street have a chance to get help. The Immaculate Conception Shelter is a
joint venture of Charter Oak, Foodshare, Immaculate and the Aetna Foundation.
Brad Howard, outreach coordinator at Charter Oak, acts like an emcee. He jokes
and asks for smiles from the people standing in line. He asks for a show of
hands of people having a good day. Of the 15 or so in line, one hand goes up.
"Can I get the next person who's smiling to come up? The next
person?" Howard asks.
At one table, a health worker is helping a woman pick out flavored lubricants.
She's handing out condoms, too. Someone else is handing out nutrition bars.
Foodshare has a truck out every day of every month, all year.
* * *
When there's food in the house, Kriss' specialty is eggs. John can make a mean
tuna casserole.
"I got two doctors, one lawyer and the president," Sandra says
proudly. "Shaquille wants to be a lawyer and the president. I tell them
they can do anything they want to do. And I am praying for them to get some
scholarships." Bump says he'll help, if he has to work until he's 90.
Her dream for herself, outside of a nursing degree, is to someday get her hair
and nails done. Yes, it's frivolous, but she has never had a day at the spa.
Meanwhile, she is looking for inexpensive Timberland work boots for her
children. The irony of her children going to a soup kitchen in $100 sneakers
(which she got on sale for $19) is not lost on her.
"My mother never did that for me," she says. "Being that I got
teenagers, I want them to have the best. Fault me for being that way. So be it.
I never had nothing out of life. I want them to."
* * *
In the end, it comes down to responsibility. Who should feed the hungry? The
government? The hungry, themselves? The rest of us, who have access to good
quality food?
"I've been doing this for 25 years, and I still don't have my 30-second
elevator ride version of it," said Winne, formerly of the Hartford Food
System. "I drive past Betances [a Hartford elementary school] and I see
children in the morning with a bag of chips and that blue Teenie drink in one hand.
I suspect that's their breakfast."
* * *
The tube that leads into Sandra's stomach is small; her cocoa skin puckers
around it like tiny lips. She feeds herself liquids through it. What she wants
is a hamburger, or some chicken. Sandra hopes one day the tube can come out,
but doctors don't give her much hope of that. The most they are talking about
these days is pain management. Papachristos is busy trying to get her an
extension on her DSS money, and trying to get some answers about Sandra's
medical prognosis. Sandra didn't ask for help, though. She worries about people
worse off than she. Papachristos is also trying to procure a doctor's note that
says Sandra can't work. How could she? The pain bends her over. The nausea
washes up her throat like a sour wave. In the meantime, Sandra keeps an eye on
her children. She wants so much more for them, so much.
Copyright 2003, Hartford
Courant