Welcome to the first ever Family-to-Family Newsletter! Every month we’ll be bringing you updated information on the latest happenings in the Family-to-Family community. We have a lot to tell you about this month… And if you have any ideas or information you think people ought to know about, please email us at famtofamily@aol.com so we can include it in the next month’s issue. Just write “Newsletter” in the subject box of your email. Here’s what’s new in March:

Family-to-Family in Africa
Pam was recently contacted by a young African activist named Jerome Kasekende who is trying to start a chapter of Family-to-Family in Uganda. He has identified the communities of Komme Islands and Mitiyana District, which are both heavily affected by HIV/AIDS, as the communities he will focus on, and has already found a priest there who has agreed to act as community contact. Jerome has found six friends so far to join him, and plans regular visits to the families he sends food to. Jerome is just 20 years old.

Money from Ziv
Our generous friends at the Ziv Tzedakah Fund have chosen to give over $5,000 to Family-to-Family, to be used in the following ways:

• $1000 will go for food (purchased locally) for 25 Montrose, Arkansas families for the next two months… to tide them over ‘til we get our new Montrose sponsoring chapters up and running.
  
  
• $1500 has been spent for the purchase of 10 sewing machines (as well as some fabric and notions) for our Myra, Kentucky receiving community. Lois Tackett, our community contact in Myra, plans to teach a sewing class so some of the women in Myra (who in past generations were quilters), can learn to quilt. Hopefully that will lead them to a viable quilting business, and self-sufficiency!
  
  
• $1200 is going to entrepreneur Gwen Jones, our community coordinator in Hope, Arkansas. She’s in need of some help getting her flower shop up and running. It’s in President Clinton’s grandfather’s old grocery store, and Gwen is the only African American florist in Hope. She needs funds to advertise, market herself and buy a used cooler for her flowers. Without one, her flowers are often overflowing in her refrigerator. She needs marketing guidance as well, so we suggested she check with the local community college to see if there is a marketing-for-small-business course that Family-to-Family might fund as well. Gwen wants to be able to sell her flowers “at just a little less” than the other florists do, because her community can’t afford those prices.
  
  
• Also in Hope, $1500 will buy and install a used industrial stove at the church where Gwen Jones runs a soup kitchen. Currently, the women of the church cook for two days to prepare a meal for the senior citizens they serve a meal to each week. Ziv donated funds to F-to-F last year for us to purchase industrial sized pots and pans for the soup kitchen.
  
  
• Lastly, $150 is going to Jesse Mae Walker’s (our Pembroke, Illinois community link) daughter, whose name is Whitney. She’s a baker and bakes pies, cookies and cakes to sell during the holidays. She’s best known for her sweet potato pie. With these funds she’ll buy the ingredients she needs, plus make up some business cards and flyers. Whitney took a young entrepreneur class offered by social services, and has made up a business plan. She charges a modest amount for her baked goods (a pie or cake is under $10). Whitney is 13 years old. Ziv’s response to our request: SENDING $150 BUT WE HAVE TO GET A PIE!

We’ll be asking the three entrepreneurs to do a report on their business for Ziv, after the first six months.

Chapter & Community Updates

We’re happy to announce that Family-to-Family has a new donating chapter in north-west Indiana (our first ever Indiana chapter) that will start sending food in April to Montrose, Arkansas families…  The new chapter chair in Indiana is Tracy Richardson, and we’re thrilled that she’s joining us.  Tracy has received a $3,000 donation (from someone who wishes to stay anonymous) to be used to pay for shipping her chapters’ boxes.

Unfortunately we’ve also lost a chapter; our donating chapter in Cartersville, Georgia has had to close.  They had been sending their food boxes to families at Red Bird Mission in Beverly, Kentucky.  Thankfully, a few of our Long Island, New York chapters have volunteered to help out, and now those Red Bird families are linked to new sponsoring families on Long Island.

We have a new community contact in Cairo, Illinois, Sharon Tillman.  Sharon and her husband Gary run the Two Rivers Ministry, which has taken over the administration of Family-to-Family in Cairo from Tammy Terry at the Cairo Christian Center. 

News from Kermit, West Virginia… Sister Jeanne at the Marrowbone Food Pantry tells us the job market is still bleak in her area.She says there are really only two industries there – timbering and coal mining, andthat the big coal company – Massey – won’t hire any coal miners that belong to or are at all affiliated with a union… not wanting to lose control over its workers, or pay union wages. She also reports that the local elementary school teachers went on strike for higher wages one day last week, protesting the fact that they are among the lowest paid teachers in the country… West Virginia ranks 47th in the nation for teacher salaries.
(PICTURES COURTESY THE MARROWBONE FOOD PANTRY)

News from Myra, Kentucky… As of today (March 19th) the 10 sewing machines we purchased with the money from Ziv have all arrived at Manna From Heaven, and Lois Tackett (our community contact in Myra) plans to set them up next week, and hopefully start her sewing class the first week in April. She has 20 women who are interested so far, and a few more who plan to come in to help teach. Everyone is looking forward to not only learning to sew, but having the opportunity to get together with a group of women on a regular basis. Lois says she’ll start with an easy project – making an apron - then move on to other clothing, and then quilts. If anyone has good-sized pieces of fabric they don’t need, they would be put to good use in Myra. The address there is: Lois Tackett, c/o Manna From Heaven, 7269 Highway 610 West, Myra, KY, 41549.

News from Lemmon, South Dakota… “The prairie of western South Dakota finally got a bit of moisture. We had a spring snow storm with about 5 inches of wet snow. Although it did no cover the entire area, we are grateful for the moisture that some of our neighbors did get. We have been in severe drought for 7 years now and many are having trouble hanging on. Our stock dams and rivers are either very low or dry. Our lakes are down several feet. Anyhow, the sight of any moisture was hopeful. Because this is ranch country, grass is a must for hay and grazing of cattle. The help to some of our families is a morale booster and we appreciate it. All ranchers are very busy right now during calving and lambing season. They are up every 2 or 3 hours all night to check the birthing mamas. Sometimes they need help--especially the heifers (first time mother cows).
It is definitely SPRING on the prairie. Pray for more moisture for us.” -- from Florence Hoff, Lemmon Community coordinator

Back to the Beginning

Pam has recently been in touch with John W. Fountain, the author of the original New York Times piece about Pembroke, Illinois. She called him to let him know what a profound difference his newspaper article had made to her life, and how she had started Family-to-Family because of it. (Here’s a link to that article front-page September 2002 New York Times article). He was very moved, and told her about his own childhood poverty, mentioning that his family was from a very poor town called Cairo, Illinois… He was then amazed to hear from Pam that because of the extreme poverty there, Cairo is one of the communities Family-to-Family has been sending food boxes to, and he is now contacting and reaching out to both Jesse Mae Walker (our Pembroke link) and Tammy Terry, our former Cairo connection, who Pam put him in touch with… re-connecting with his roots and discovering the help that he inadvertently brought to the town where his grandfather and relatives had settled … You can read (or listen to) an essay by John W. Fountain that appeared on National Public Radio in which he describes his childhood at NPR : The God Who Embraced Me.

Community Profile

Every month we hope to profile one of the 13 F-to-F sponsored communities. A few of you may already have seen this information on Red Bird Mission in Beverly, Kentucky (which was emailed out to Red Bird sponsoring chapter chairs). This summary was written by Natalie Barry, a F-to-F board member as well as our chapter coordinator, who, along with board treasurer Beth Spickler, visited Red Bird Mission in December.

Red Bird Mission — Red Bird Mission is located in the hamlet of Beverly, in the rural and rather inaccessible southeastern corner of Kentucky. The closest major city is Lexington, which is 2-1/2 hours by car. The closest town with a grocery store is Manchester, a 45-minute drive away; some folks do their bi-monthly food shopping even further away, in Tennessee, which is over two hour’s distance from Beverly. The closest public school is over an hour away from the Mission. There is no cell phone service within one hour of Beverly and 911 emergency response, although recently introduced into the area, sometimes takes up to 45 minutes to get to a destination.

The county in which Beverly is located (Clay) is the 2nd most impoverished county in the United States, in terms of families living below the poverty line. Median family income is $9,716, according to the 2000 US census. There are three major employers in the area – the state of Kentucky (which includes county and school personnel), the Mission itself (which employs some 80 people in a full- and part-time capacity), and the coal mine down the road from the Mission.

Some other, more sobering, facts about the surrounding area:

• The roads in the area are one lane in each direction, with no shoulders. There is often a steep drop on either side of the road, so – with any sort of snowfall – driving becomes very treacherous.
  
  
• Most houses are small, many with corrugated metal roofs. Because we did not go off the single main road, we didn’t see the worst of the housing stock, which can be ramshackle (Natalie saw some of these shacks in a visit to Beverly over 25 years ago). The most a family could hope for is to be able to afford a single-story, pre-fabricated house that looks almost like a small single-wide trailer.
  
  
• Many families supported by the Mission have lived on their plot of land for several generations. They are proud landowners, although often their ownership has stipulations, which has a great impact on their children.
  
  
• This stems from the fact that – many years ago – the state sold the mining and forestry rights to much of the surrounding land to major corporations and/or mining companies, even though people claimed ownership to it. The deeds therefore state that a family could keep their land ONLY IF their descendents continued to live on the property. This effectively binds the young people to the land, because if they left, the family would lose ownership of the property.
  
  
• Because of the brutal nature of mining work, many of the miners end up going on disability. Unfortunately, what has happened is that the younger generation sees this as an end in itself. They will therefore often try to go out on disability themselves. This lack of initiative, combined with the inability to leave their property to search for new opportunity, perpetuates the cycle of poverty in this part of Kentucky.

All in all, it was a fascinating trip. Our impression was of a very depressed area that, nevertheless, had the good fortune to be served by Red Bird Mission. And while we didn’t get a chance to meet many of the locals, we got a chance to visit with the very warm and welcoming folks at Red Bird. They truly represented the best of the human spirit – and we left the area on Saturday, marveling at how much good could come out of the concentrated effort of a few dedicated people. All of us at Family-to-Family look forward to continuing our work at Red Bird, in terms of food shipments and whatever other programs we can help them with.

That’s all for this month – hope you enjoyed it. Please let us know your thoughts… we’d love to hear them!

---Pam and the Family-to-Family team