I had a conversation with Karen L. Harker who lives in Huntington and who moved here from the the northern part of the state & who an August EJ Real Life Mobile Pantry event. In our conversation Karen laid out for me how tough things can be for her and how much relief coming to our mobile distributions provides her because her budget is really tight each week.
“I have to pay $200 for my car insurance and I have to pay all of my utilities. The only other help I get is rental assistance and while that helps I have between $300 and $400 in utilities. My electric bill is the most expensive in my house because I live in an all-electric apartment.”
Karen shared with me also that she expects her life to get harder as a result of the passage of the Budget Reconciliation Bill this Summer: “I know that all of the cutbacks with SNAP and everything else will really hurt a lot of people. A lot of people like me depend on food banks like yours because I don’t have a lot of income. I only get $108 per month in food stamps and that is for me and for an elderly person in my home that’s not able to work. Living on $987 a month isn’t a lot of money. I do buy some food each month when I have the extra money but things are tight and food is expensive. West Virginia is losing a lot of federal funding and they want the state to pick up the SNAP benefits (costs) and our state can’t afford that. West Virginia is a state that relies on a lot of federal funding because we aren’t a rich state. It’s tough out here.”
Karen updated me also that she’s recently been trying to eat healthier and lose weight but it has been having an effect on her grocery bill: “I’ve been trying to lose weight and I’ve been told to eat whole foods but whole foods are expensive. You can spend between $40 and $50 on whole foods, which includes fruits, certain vegetables and fresh protein like unprocessed turkey, and that won’t even cover you for a week but rather it might last three to four days.
I had a chance to discuss Karen’s appreciation for Facing Hunger Foodbank and other resources she counts on with her: “I come here to this mobile pantry and then I go to Children’s Home Society and they give me a small box that includes three gallons of milk each month. I go there and here and that’s the only food and extra help I get and it’s hard. The thing about it is everything that I have I own and it’s paid for and I’m in good shape that way. If I didn’t get rental assistance I don’t know what I would do. Being here at this event puts enough food in my freezer for a month or a month and a half, which is a big help. A lot of the other places you get food from might only provide enough food for a week. I get enough frozen food here to put it in the freezer and it might last me a month and a half, so you all are a big help. A lot of people are coming here (to this event) because they can’t afford food and they’re in the situation I’m in.
Karen also shared with me how her life has been better after relocating to Huntington and having access to organizations that make her life easier: “I come from the northern part of the state in Belington in Barbour County and you can’t get any help up there with it being pretty rural. Because there were no resources up there I moved down here to have a better life and you can get more help living down here and there are more resources here. People here understand the struggle because somebody along the line has been through it. I got here an hour early today and there were already 11 people in front of me. If I didn’t get here until 12:20 pm I would be all the way around the block to 26th Street Baptist Church and probably have 15 or 20 people in front of me.”