New York: Most never needed help from a food pantry. But a month since the US government shutdown began, dozens of federal employees have been lining up in Brooklyn here, for basics.
Customs, tax and emergency management officials are all among the crowd, having gone unemployed since December 22.
Others deemed ‘essential’ like transportation workers or prison guards are forced to continue working without pay, taking advantage of their lunch breaks to stock up.
Volunteers are manning distribution tables in the lobby of Barclays Centre here, which usually hosts concerts or sporting events rather than charity drives.
Those in need, first register and then fill plastic bags with canned goods, potatoes, chicken, grapes and basic toiletries. “I came here to grab some goods, to be honest,” said Antoinette Peek-Williams, an employee of the Homeland Security Department, who came an hour by subway from Harlem. “Any way I can save money and put towards something else – that’s what I am trying to do.”
She hopes to return to work on February 1 – an optimism of which she’s no longer so certain. “I am a person where the glass is always half-full,” said the mother of a college student. “I have to stay hopeful. If you don’t have hope, you don’t have anything.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Chante Johnson, a tax administrator. But ‘it’s getting rough’, the 48-year-old said. “It’s coming, like, to the end of everything.”
Johnson provides for a daughter along with her mother, and said she hasn’t been able to sleep or eat healthy since being out of work.
“I just want them (government) to end the shutdown,” Johnson pointed out. Start talking and open up the government.”
For those federal workers forced to work without pay, the situation is even more tense. They can only testify anonymously, sworn to confidentiality.
“It is very stressful,” said one 39-year-old single mother, who works as a prison guard at Brooklyn’s federal detention facility.
She came to the food pantry on her lunch break seeking enough to prepare a few meals. Her daughter is nearing the end of high school, and as students apply for universities, she laments being unable to pay her child’s application fees.
The shutdown has exacerbated an already precarious situation in a city where soaring rents are pushing more and more families into poverty, said Francisco Tezen, head of development at the Food Bank for New York City. The non-profit, the city’s largest food assistance organisation, hosted the distribution along with corporate sponsors.
“Something like this is unprecedented, it’s almost equivalent to times when we have had to activate response and services in response to a disaster,” asserted Tezen.
In Johnson’s view, the border situation is not dire enough to require the USD 5.7 billion President Donald Trump has demanded to build a wall.
“What happened? Did a Mexican beat him up as a little boy so he is so gung-ho on this wall?” she asked. “Talk about it and get us back to work that we love doing.”
AFP