Thanks so much to the residents and all those who make the Mountain Air Community Fund possible!

Without your continued support, we could not do what we do in a daily basis. A special thanks to MACF staffers: Marcie, Joan, Tom, Jeanette, and anyone I missed mentioning.

Robert Wyatt

I will attempt, in the new year, to blog/vlog on a more regular basis. None of what we do is for your praise or admiration – it is to continously put the spotlight on THE HUNGRY CHILD. Remember, Research has shown that food insecurity (lack of reliable access to healthy meals) can put kids at risk of developing a host of health, cognitive and emotional problems, from iron deficiency to anxiety.

“I Was Always, Always Looking for More” by Best-selling novelist Paula McLain

IN MY 48 YEARS, I’ve moved so many times, I sometimes think in a past life I must have been a Bedouin, caravanning on a lurching camel from one desert oasis to the next, my throat parched by pale sand, everything I owned lashed to my back.

In this life, I spent most of my childhood in foster care in California’s Central Valley, where oases were generally winking mirages. My mother was in her mid-20s, an overwhelmed waitress with three daughters under 6. My father, shiftless and unpredictable, was in and out of the county jail — and also our lives.

I was 4 the day my mother took us to my grandmother’s house in central Fresno, saying she was going to the movies, and never came back. She wasn’t prepared to care for us, and our father wouldn’t or couldn’t step up. We were pitched, with no warning or fanfare, into the welfare system. The long caravan began.

Over the next four years, we careened between foster-care placements and relatives who stepped in temporarily when no one else would take us. Our social worker’s name was Mrs. O’Rourke. We would know we were moving only when we saw her pull up at whatever place we were living in. Our clothes would be tossed into garbage bags to be handed to our next set of temporary parents.

When I was 8, Mrs. O’Rourke delivered our bags and us to a squat ranch house in the country and a family I’ll call the Lindberghs. At our first dinner, our new mother, Hilde, made a huge pot of spaghetti and set it in the center of the dining table, all-you-can-eat style, with two wooden spoons for serving ourselves. The pot was massive and I was ravenous, yet I was afraid to take any. I wasn’t sure how much was allowed — how much it was safe to want. I’d felt that way for as long as I could remember, in all the houses we’d lived in. It led to being hungry a lot, whether or not there was food in front of me.

“You’re too skinny,” Jim Lindbergh said that night. “Hasn’t anyone ever fed you girls?” I guess I’d never looked at myself closely enough to know that the hunger I’d felt for years wasn’t just something I wore invisibly, on the inside. He instigated a contest: Whoever gained the most weight in a month would win a treat. My sister Penny and I stood in front of the refrigerator, daring each other to eat sticks of butter. I gobbled a dozen links of sausage for breakfast, plus pancakes and eggs, feeling queasy and stuffed, though not necessarily nourished. Not fed.

Years passed, and somehow we stayed with the Lindberghs. Yet even as our situation gradually began to feel more solid, I remained diaphanous. A thin girl no matter what I weighed, and a hungry girl even though — as a kind of party trick — I could devour a large pizza and then look around for more. I was always, always looking for more.

Perhaps the worst feeling of all was to know how needy and desperate I actually was. Part of our support package from the welfare system was receiving free school lunches. Each month, my sisters and I would get a green sheet of lunch tickets stamped Free on the back, which we could turn in at the cafeteria. It should have been a fairly easy transaction, but to me, Free meant “orphan.” I was someone to feel sorry for, not remotely like the hundreds of swirling kids around me whose parents wanted them and whose houses and clothes weren’t rented or borrowed, but theirs.

I hadn’t “outed” myself to any of my friends or teachers and wanted to keep it that way — and so for years I pitched my lunch tickets into a trash can in the lunchroom at school and went hungry, preferring the twinges in my belly to the knot of obligation I felt to take “charity” and the idea of being less whole, wanted, loved or “normal” than my friends. At least hunger could be trusted. It was real.

At 18, I was cast — as are all kids in the foster system — out into the world without even a modicum of financial support. I worked at a convalescent hospital for minimum wage. With my sister Teresa, I rented a ramshackle house we could barely afford (Penny was still with the Lindberghs). We had no bank account, so when we got a paycheck, we cashed it at a strip mall and put the money into a drawer in the kitchen where the utensils would have gone if we had owned enough.

We were living well below the poverty line, yet I remember being really happy during those years. Many nights we ate something simple out of a shared wooden bowl, sitting by the heating grate on the floor. One night it was a big can of chili. When we reached the bottom of the scraped-clean bowl, I leaned back against the wall, holding my licked-clean spoon. I didn’t want anything else. Somehow, after years of feeling empty, I was full.

No story ties up so neatly — not when humans are involved. But for that moment, my sister and I could focus on the newly simple act of taking care of ourselves. Apart from Penny, who still lived a few miles away, everything important was right there. What we needed we carried with us. Not unlike Bedouins. Not unlike those who survive the lives they’re given and find a way to get where they need to go, and to be fed along the way.

Paula McLain

Our hearts at Feed-a-child have never been heavier than this Sunday morning after learning that our most special “Mary Ellen” had passed to her reward in Heaven.

What a heart she had for the children of this county!

There are those people that only come once into your life and when they are gone can never be replaced – Mary Ellen Murphy Robinson was one of ours.

We will miss her love for God, her smile, her laugh, and her neverending enthusiasm and encouragement, immensely.

Please pray for her family.

Feed-a-child will continue – but there will always be an empty chair at our table.

Robert & Glenda Wyatt<><

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