Bill Shore’s Letters
Letter from the site of a rescue operation
Originally published: June 2008
Last Thursday morning, as we set out on a Hinges of Hope trip in Boston, all of the local TV stations were broadcasting live from the site of a rescue operation that had riveted the city for the previous 24 hours. A transit train on the green line heading into town had plowed into another train on the tracks in front of it. Injured passengers were rushed to area hospitals but the main drama centered on the unsuccessful attempt to save the conductor trapped in the wreckage. News helicopters hovered overhead and the Boston Globe put it on the front page. It was a terrible tragedy and there was a sense that it could have been prevented.
Our twenty-five member Hinges of Hope delegation spent the same day witnessing another kind of rescue operation. We traveled Boston's neighborhoods bearing witness to efforts to rescue the poorest children from malnutrition, hunger, poverty, and gangs. We also had the sense that the tragedies we learned of could have been prevented. But no TV cameras or newspaper reporters showed up.
You would know I'm not just reaching for a dramatic analogy if you'd been with us and Dr. Debbie Frank at Boston Medical Center's Grow Clinic, where they have seen a 27% increase in under-nourished children referred by other physicians. It is the only hospital in the country with a food pantry attached to it that requires a physician's prescription to access. When it opened it anticipated filling 600 such prescriptions a month. Just last month it served 5500 people.
Dr. Frank emphasized that "malnutrition is not an eyeball diagnosis." She explained that some malnourished kids were short instead of skinny and that it was easier to understand why someone might be poor, hungry and fat when you consider that potato chips provide 1200 calories per dollar and carrots only 250 calories per dollar.
Dr. Frank described the data collection efforts of the Children's Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program (C-SNAP) which Share Our Strength helped create, and how the number of underweight babies increased 30% after the coldest three months of the year, because of the "heat or eat" dilemma parents faced. "Public policies and economic conditions are written on the bodies of babies," Dr. Frank said. Making the case for C-SNAP (and Hinges of Hope), she urged that "When you can't do anything else ... document!"
We also toured Community Servings which delivers excellent meals to the seriously ill, and we visited with graduates of an Operation Frontline course who described the better food choices they now made. One of the unanticipated highlights was watching a group of these young moms interact with each other. Black, white, Latino, German - all with children in Head Start - they had not socialized until they met through OFL. They were now clearly part of a community of their own making.
Our last stop was Boys and Girls Club in Roxbury that teemed with 280 kids who were fed dinner every night through their Kids Café. The pool, gym, art room, computer center, homework classes, and dedicated staff offered just about everything a child could ask for. But there were at least 200 kids on the waiting list to get into this club who had no such safe haven to spend their after school hours. The staff explained how they made the children remove any colors that signaled their affiliations with gangs. Part of their rescue effort includes a Boys and Girls Club social worker based at every police station because when a juvenile is arrested, the arresting officer has the discretion to drop the file in the in-box of the social worked instead of the juvenile justice system.
In contrast to the site of the train wreck we saw no flashing lights or extra resources being deployed to help children in danger, or even widespread awareness of the rescue operations underway. In that regard I haven't told you anything you don't already know. When it comes to media coverage, the ordinary, ongoing and routine always lose out to the unexpected occurrence. The voiceless and the vulnerable don't attract the cameras or coverage of the cinematic drama of the day.
That's why bearing witness continues to be such an important way of sharing strength. And why Share Our Strength continues to play such a role in Boston, New Orleans, New York and wherever hungry children have a story that needs to be told.
