From the Trenches: Primary Experience.

by Gilbert Wesley Purdy


The Palanca Food Pantry shares its digs with Florida’s 3048th and 3056th precincts on election days. It’s quite an effort to resituate the Tuesday programs for the homeless, & etc., to the west side of the church so that voters may trickle comfortably into the doors on the east side.

As always, the pantry proper, during which we provide a box of food to take home (for the homeless, generally a camp in the woods), had been rescheduled. On this occasion, however, the word got out too late for many of the patrons to be informed of the change. My bad. I’d lost track of which Tuesday was primary day. As a result, Rosa, Cecilia and I spent the morning handing bags of food out of the kitchen door and loading deliveries into it; that and brewing continuous pots of coffee for ourselves and the dozen or so precinct volunteers.

I did actually have the presence of mind to call the Health District group, the day before, to tell them that the pantry would not be opening on the usual day. Under normal circumstances we set up a table for them the fourth Tuesday of every month. Tara was away from her desk so I left a voice mail. They arrived anyway. She has been out sick.

Dave, the new supervisor of 3056, had come to the church last Friday, during the community meal, to see if he could talk us into giving him a key to the building. He is apparently of Indian (as in the subcontinent) extraction with just a slight accent. His children were with him: a boy and a girl, very quiet and well behaved, with sparkling eyes. They looked like they had stepped out of a 21st century version of a Norman Rockwell painting.

The teams arrive at 6:00 AM. Maggie, the supervisor of 3048, already had a key, but I was more than happy to provide another in hopes that a knock would not come at my door at such an ungodly hour.

So then, I was able to sleep until the almost godly hour of 8:00 AM at which time I heard the bustle of the pantry patrons passing my door. I arrived in the kitchen to find the touch-screen voting machines, which had been delivered on Thursday, all on their stands, in the hall adjacent, and the volunteers all at their tables. The “Election Deputies” were posted outside the door to each precinct in their tired orange vests.

After the impromptu pantry, the St. Rita’s group showed up to serve lunch. The crowd was even larger than usual, but, apart from a bit of pushing and shoving, things went well enough. As everyone waited for their food I held mail call. (One of the many difficulties the homeless face is the lack of a mailing address.) One of the Sheriff’s Deputies who were covering the “feed” noticed my backwards Green Bay Packer cap and we analyzed our team’s season-ending loss to the Giants to death.

Clearing the property of meal patrons, after the feed, was more problematical. A----- (being a patron, his name will remain anonymous) has recently been kicked out of his parents’ home. He is a mild mannered young guy in his early twenties and lacks all but the simplest interpersonal and job skills. The currents of life carry him along wherever they will. His thought processes are profoundly confused, obsessive, magical.

The pantry being one of the few remaining places where he may be received with a kind word, A----- wants to remain now and be taken care of full time. He neither wants to seek a job nor has he any reason to believe that he can maintain one should he find one. All of his opportunities lie on the far side of years of intensive therapy and skills training none of which is available to him.

We did convince him to apply for jobs last summer and he did find one flipping burgers. His boss called him “stupid,” with some regularity, and in front of the other employees, though, and I spent many hours trying to advise him how he might handle the situation. A good deal of the time was spent explaining why punching the boss was the worst possible idea.

He’d run into "demons" before, A----- informed me. He "can see them." This one was trying to steal his spirit. He held on for several months. It is not clear whether he quit or was fired.

His situation having become still more desperate, now that he has no place to stay, A----- wandered over to the voters’ side of the building and huddled beneath the level of the shrubbery. When I came upon him and told him that it was time to clear the property he faintly nodded “okay”. As he dawdled, back on the pantry side, and was told again that it was time to leave, he asked to use the Port-o-Let, outside of which I stood, after some ten minutes had passed, calling him to come out. When he did eventually do so he slowly walked toward the road mumbling "’T’s a church, yuh son-of-a-bitch."

A----- has fathered two children.

By 3:00 PM it was just me and the precinct volunteers. There was not a voter to be seen. I put on another pot of coffee, as one of the volunteers cleaned her uppers in the kitchen, and announced the fact (of the coffee, of course) to cheers. The various snacks they’d left on a counter in the kitchen had largely survived the occasional wandering pantry patron.

As I emerged from the church office, having checked the Share Your Voting Experience opened thread, at the Palm Beach Post’s Florida Politics Blog, Maggie jumped up to play a few bars from a Beethoven concerto on the upright that we’ve been trying to get rid of forever. It was well played, actually, and the after-work rush of voters had failed to materialize. As supervisor, it was surely her responsibility to keep her people alert. She received a healthy round of applause.

I launched into a description of my relationship to the pantry in reply to a question from Carmen, the voting key-card validater, with whom I’ve shared the polling place experience for some years now. Fifteen minutes later I figured he’d had enough and released him from the results of his foolish mistake. How he kept a smile going for that long I don’t know.

The first few paragraphs of this piece were waiting for me back in the office toward which I retired. The hour of 7:00 PM was soon upon us and the voting machines being loaded back into their plastic cases. In less than a half hour the cases were secured onto the two carriers on which they had arrived (where they await the Division of Elections panel truck) and good byes being said. I was left with a sweatshirt, that I was to consider a “donation” if the volunteer who owned it did not return for it, and a gratifyingly quiet evening.





This article first appeared, on January 30, 2008, in the Talking Points Memo Café but was lost due to technical problems during a changeover of servers at that site.

From the Trenches: the Palanca Food Pantry.

by Gilbert Wesley Purdy


The holidays were unusually busy at the Palanca Food Pantry here in little Lake Worth, Florida. Our crowds are up about 50% this year and resources are stressed but the response of our partners and the community at large has been gratifyingly up to the task thus far. On balance, we are able to meet the additional demand.

The communities we serve — the homeless, persons on fixed income (retirement and disability), and the working poor — are particularly vulnerable to economic fluctuations. In this area the homeless and working poor depend heavily upon housing construction for their limited earnings, the homeless through temporary, largely minimum-wage “labor halls” and the working poor through (or as) small sub-subcontractors.

Clients who have managed to avoid homelessness for years, if not decades, in ramshackle trailers, in run down trailer parks, are now living in their cars, catching a few harried hours of sleep wherever they can. The trailers they occupied now house those who used to be able to afford run down apartments. Increasing numbers of those apartments and trailers now have no electricity, the utility bills not having been paid. Increasing numbers of those cars have no insurance. They are driven sparingly as gas costs above $3.00 per gallon and there is generally no money available for repairs.

The guys who hang out at the exits from the Home Depot parking lot, just around the corner from here, waiting for contractors who might stop on the way out to hire their services for a day, are not having much luck just now. They know the pantry’s feeding schedule and often must be satisfied to have one good meal for their efforts. They generally sleep together in large numbers in crumbling trailers that no one else will rent.

Most major intersections in town feature four panhandlers, one on each of the four corners. There are only a tiny number of shelter beds available in the county and those are nearly 10 miles away in downtown West Palm Beach. The nearby Westgate Tabernacle has been the de facto shelter for the area for years now but they have been cited by the county, as part of a real estate battle, for operating a shelter without a license. The Tabernacle lost its court case. The back fines are enormous and another $20,000, or more, may be required in order to pursue an appeal. It will likely close soon.

While the safety net that was once available to our clientele is in tatters after a decade of reduced funding for the poor and disabled, the banking sector, rocked by its own poor decision making, has a strong ally in its government. The safety net available to the major market players, that is to say, grows more impressive with each passing year. This clearly constitutes an ongoing policy.

While the U.S. equity markets have been taking losses, it’s true, there is little likelihood that they will crash. The Federal Reserve is infusing hundreds of billions of dollars into the credit markets via special auctions. January 2008 having begun with a succession of daily stock market losses, the Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, preemptively promised another interest rate cut just today. According to the Associated Press:

Wall Street was buoyed by Bernanke's words. The Dow Jones jumped 117.78 points to close at 12,853.09.

Foreign central banks are coordinating the effort to limit the damage to investors from the subprime mortgage crisis and cyclical downturn of world markets. Our market safety nets have been strengthen on a par with our fierce weaponry over the past three decades. Who could possibly argue against preventing economic downturns?

But the effects of yet another investor bubble, which, of course, greatly enriched those who got in and out on time, will have to be felt somewhere. That somewhere is at food pantries, such as Palanca, among the people represented by the recent .3% up tick in unemployment, and among those who have disappeared from our statistical radar altogether and appeared on our street corners and at the exits from Home Depot parking lots. Among those just one economic level above, it will be felt by way of lower quality housing, damaged credit ratings, the further loss of access to government programs that will come with the inevitable tax cut attendant upon a “stimulus package,” the loss of basic healthcare, and more.


This article first appeared, in early January, 2008, in the Talking Points Memo Café but was lost due to technical problems during a changeover of servers at that site.