How seniors help the family

By Andrew Lampard
October 1, 2009

This modest food pantry helps lots of Highbridge seniors. Photo Credit: Andrew Lampard

It is 1:55 p.m. on the second Thursday of the month and already there are five metal carts lined up in front of the food pantry’s door. The owners of the carts, five Dominican women, mingle with one another, speaking in Spanish. They have been here 45 minutes and have another hour to wait before the food is handed out. By then, 49 others will have positioned their carts in the line. Not one patron in the group will be younger than 65.

Welcome to the Christ the King food pantry on Marcy Street, just a few storefronts west of the Grand Concourse. Every second and fourth Thursday of the month, the Church’s rectory operates a food pantry for elderly citizens of Community District No. 4 in the Bronx in Highbridge. The only eligibility requirements are that you be 65 years of age or older and live in the district.

Having approved clients’ eligibility, the pantry’s organizer, Antonio Torres, registers residents in the patron’s database and issues them membership cards. Torres, 58, updates his registry every week on a computer. From his office in the rectory yesterday, he said that demand for food from his pantry far exceeds supply. According to his registry, the number of patrons who frequent the pantry has doubled since last September.

Torres, a native of Ecuador who moved to New York City in 1983, blames the recession for the increase in patrons. He said that the senior citizens who frequent his pantry do so because they are supporting extended family members, many of whom are unemployed. “Many, many seniors do this,” Torres said. “[They] come in alone.” In the Hispanic community, he said, many seniors live with the family.

Of the 4th District’s 135,256 people, 62 percent are Hispanic or Latino, according to the most recent data collected by the US Census Bureau in 2007; statistics from the Census Bureau say that 17 percent of all households in the district have one or more people 65 and over.

Juana Sanchez is one of the early arrivals at the pantry. Originally from the Dominican Republic, Sanchez, 67, moved to the Bronx from her homeland 15 years ago. She lives with her son, 45, and his three children, ages 21, 19 and 16, in an apartment on Townsend Avenue five blocks away from the pantry. They moved in with her from the Dominican Republic two years ago.

Through an interpreter, she says in Spanish that her son has only been able to find seasonal employment as an ice-cream vendor. When winter comes, he will be out of a job. The only other income the household receives comes from Sanchez’s 19-year-old grandson. He works part-time after school at an “Easy Picky” clothing store in Fordham.

Sanchez says she comes to the pantry to provide necessary food for her family. She would try to find employment, she says, were it not for her right arm, which is practically limp. She says she permanently damaged it two years ago when she tripped and fell while riding on an escalator and her right arm got caught in the machinery. Were it not for Section 8 housing vouchers that subsidize most of her household’s rent and the $677 in public assistance checks she receives each month (she does not know from which agency), Sanchez says she and her family would not get by.

The Bronx has been hit hard by the recession. This month alone, the unemployment rate in New York City has risen to 8.6 percent, more than a point lower than the national average, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the Bronx, however, 12.5 percent of its 1,391,903 population is unemployed, according to unemployment rates were sourced from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website.

The unemployment rate is not the only troublesome economic statistic that has risen this year. The US Census Bureau announced yesterday that the national poverty rate in 2008 was 13.2 percent, up almost a full percentage point from the previous year. In that total is the number of people who are food insecure, meaning those who live within fear of hunger or starvation, according to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. According to the Coalition Against Hunger, 1.3 million New Yorkers live in households that are food insecure, an increase of 1.4 percent over the previous three-year period.

None of this is news to Torres. The worsening economic plight of his neighbors is evident in the ever-growing line of metal carts outside the rectory’s door on pantry days. He said he knows the statistics are getting worse because he increasingly has to turn away more and more eligible seniors who want to sign up.

Said Torres, “Last week, more than a hundred people came and we had to tell them we couldn’t register them because we didn’t have enough food for them.”

Torres’ food supply is limited by the rectory’s scarcity of storage space and willing volunteers. Unlike other pantries in the neighborhood, said Torres, Christ the King Church’s pantry is not reliant on deliveries from City Harvest and the Food Bank of New York City.

While he does order from those services twice a month, he said, most of his resources come from the United Way and the Catholic Charities Community Services in the form of annual grants: $12,300 and $9,500, respectively this year. He uses the grants to purchase the pantry’s food from Driscoll Foods, a United Way vendor. Depending on the number of people in a family, the pantry is able to give out enough food to feed each household member three meals for three days, Torres said. Patrons are only able to use the pantry once a month.

Unfortunately, the grants are not ample enough for Torres to hire part-time staff. Without consistent help, Torres is unable to physically arrange enough packages to meet the demand outside. “We need money to give incentives to people to volunteer,” he said.

For Torres, who has a masters degree in social work from Fordham University and is studying for another in nutrition, not having enough money to entice people to help sort food is his most frustrating obstacle: “You need to provide [them with] money, lunch, any kind of incentive.”

Torres’ his annual salary is $21,000, he said. He is a single parent; his son is a sophomore on scholarship at UC Berkeley. Were it not for the scholarship money his son receives, Torres said he would also need to line up at a food pantry.

Back in the lineup outside the rectory, the patrons’ conversations have grown louder. At 2:50 p.m., Torres personally opens the pantry’s outer door. All of the elderly in the line know him from having registering with him. Torres greets them in Spanish as they slowly move past him into the pantry’s waiting area. Music by Eligio Nunez, a Colombian salsa singer, plays on a portable CD player in the corner.

Each week before the patrons receive their packages, Torres delivers a speech. Today he informs them about a nutrition fair that is set to take place on Marcy Street next week. Then he talked about his clients: “We try to empower seniors by changing [their] meaning of the word ‘senior.’ We change in their minds that it means ‘older.’ Because in our [American] culture, ‘older’ is something you don’t use anymore,” Torres said.

Instead, he wants them to connect the word “senior” with wisdom. The elderly patrons listen quietly to Torres. The food is about to be handed out. Their carts, empty now, are waiting.