A MYSTERY READER SPEAKS OUT!!

mystery4, originally uploaded by Oldmaison.

Hey Charles, just for the record, the Fredericton Food Bank may be in a middle class neighborhood but, it is run and has always been run by members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, a non-profit organization.

My mother was the director there for years and years, and trust me, she was no middle age, middle class, middle of the road feminist who didn't know what was what.

My mother lived being poor in living colour for most of her life.

She was a tireless advocate for poor people in this city until she had a tragic accident in the very dooryard of the foodbank, breaking her ankle. This was late 2003.

She is severely diabetic and the fracture resulted in her having to get her leg amputated.

She was working long after the doctors told her to stop.

Nobody understood the lives of people on and off the system, the working poor, the students like my mum...

My mum knows what it is like to carry water to boil to drink and for your kid's bath once every other week or so, to have no power, to choose whether to buy milk or dishsoap at the store, one or the other, even though you need both desperately, because you don't have enough money for both, to buy or otherwise get shoddy hand me downs for her kids and then sew them till the look half decent, she knows what it is like to have nothing but oatmeal to eat for a week til check day, she knows what it is like to wash clothes in freezing cold water in winter in an old wringer washer because she absolutely has to and then hang them all over the house to dry.

She knows what it is like to put stuff back at the store because she didn't have enough money to pay for everything needed to feed her children...with the help of her church, in that same middle class neighborhood, got a better life for herself and her children...

The FFB does good work, and more than a small part of the reason they do is because of my mother, Sharon Ferguson...

This being said, don't judge a food bank, or the folks who run it, by it's neighborhood...

If you have had a poor experience, I am sorry...