Society
beyond poverty

The Meaning in That Very Simple Gesture 
Families that have come apart, people who have lost their jobs at fifty years of age, old people who live alone, these “new poor” share one fact in common: solitude. They also share the yearning for a bond that can rekindle their hope. What happens when they encounter charity?
Here is the answer. Although made up of Italian faces and stories, this kind of charity is a valuable experience for everyone, changing those who give as well as those who receive. 

by Paolo Perego

It was an evening in 1999, the last evening of a ten-year marriage. The door opened, and Antonella, holding the hands of her two children, closed it behind her, leaving a violent husband who relegated her to the house because “the only thing you need to think about is the family.” Her present was just those few clothes thrown on in a rush; her future, a void. In the months that followed, she looked for work, spent sleepless nights on the floor of her parents’ house, had interviews with social workers, and went to sessions with psychologists, stealing time and space for her children. But things didn’t change, and Antonella felt increasingly alone. Then, one day, a volunteer rang the doorbell. “I’d heard people talking about the Solidarity Food Banks and I was able to contact them,” recounts Antonella. That girl had two bags of groceries with her, with rice, pasta, tuna, and other items. The same thing happened two weeks later. In the beginning, Antonella couldn’t look her in the eyes. “I was so uncomfortable and ashamed.” But, as time passed, she came to look forward to the volunteer’s visit, not so much for the food as for the friendship that came with the groceries. This friendship is a light that re-opens people’s eyes to hope. “I wasn’t ashamed about the food anymore; I felt fortunate. My cross, which was so heavy, was becoming gilded.”
Antonella’s is a difficult story, but similar to many in recent times. Everybody talks about a new poverty, about people who for all sorts of reasons can’t make ends meet. This poverty is rooted in solitude, one that you don’t have to go far to find. It’s the old man next door, the lady across the hall, your mechanic, people who have nothing to cling to in trying to start afresh.
This is clearly documented in the Report on Food Poverty in Italy, published recently by the Foundation for Subsidiarity in collaboration with several professors of the Catholic University of Milan and of the University of Milan-Bicocca. According to Luigi Campiglio and Giancarlo Rovati, who conducted the study, the numbers explain it. In Italy, there are more than 3.5 million people (1,265,000 families, 5.3% of the total of Italian families) who cannot afford adequate nutrition. But the new face of this poverty is seen in the situations this data describes: the “new poor” are those who lose their jobs at the age of fifty because their firm had to cut back, old people who end up alone with an inadequate pension, people emerging from broken marriages who can’t make it economically. Often their bonds of friendship or family aren’t strong enough to help them in such difficult circumstances, and they remain alone.

Two by two, from house to house.  “True food poverty isn’t simply the lack of bread,” explains Giorgio Vittadini, President of the Foundation for Subsidiarity, in the preface to the report. “These people can’t improve their condition. The crucial challenge in the battle against poverty is to educate the poor to rebuild bonds, to take initiative to change their own condition.”
“Very true. For people we meet, it’s not enough that we bring them a bag of food,” says Andrea Franchi, President of the Italian Federation of Solidarity Food Banks, 154 entities spread throughout Italy that help 32,000 families in difficulty. How? “The Solidarity Food Banks are groups of people who decide to educate themselves to Christian charity through a gesture of sharing the need of families in the area where they live. The gesture is simple: every fifteen days, usually in pairs, they bring bags of food directly to the homes of these people. Most of the food comes from the Food Bank Foundation, which has always helped our work.”
Two by two, from house to house... “Because it’s only in a human encounter like this that one can start fresh.” It’s hard to explain in words, but easier to understand when you look at what happens, at the change in those who receive the groceries and those who bring them. You have to look at both “because, deep down, their need is the same,” says Franchi. In order to discover how true this is, just look at Antonella. Something set her in motion again. The groceries that arrived in her home every two weeks brought something more important than the charitable gesture of some well-intentioned soul. After a while, Antonella was asked to bring food aid to another family. “I felt happy because it seemed like I was bringing it to myself.” Her life has changed. “I have a job and sometimes, thank God, I even work overtime. I have a car, and I rent a place for my children and myself. It’s still tough, but I feel like I’m giving back what I’ve received. I want my children to appreciate everything we possess, and now that they’re older I want them to make an effort themselves. I’ve decided to stop receiving the food, but I’m not giving up my friend! On Wednesday evenings I go with her to the Solidarity Food Bank.”

“I’m the needier one.” Another story, another city: Madè is from Varese, and brings groceries to a woman who lives alone with her children. “I’m coming to realize that I’m the needier one,” she says, with a clear image of what she saw, knocking on that family’s door the first time: a dark house, damp and unheated, in a poor area, practically in the woods outside the city. The woman was separated and unemployed. Her son often skipped school because he didn’t have bus money, and his sisters sat out trips to the pool because they did not have swimsuits. In the beginning, Madè just brought the food and shared their need, but then it became natural to share their other problems–clothes, a decent house, a job for the mother. “That very simple gesture has opened out into a broader relationship,” she explains. “My family and my friends help me to help them. But also my heart is opening, becoming gladder. I’ve grown to want to hear from them and to go visit them whenever possible. Doing it opens a wound in me, reminding me of what is dearest in life–not money or things, but that someone should love me.”
The same thing happens in Bari, where an old man, too, needs someone to care about him. Anna brings him groceries because his pension is not enough. On his table he has all sorts of medicines. “I don’t know if you’ll find me here in two weeks time.” Anna doesn’t understand. She tells him that if she doesn’t find him, she’ll look for him in the neighborhood, or if he goes to live elsewhere he can give her his new address. Anna doesn’t understand, and goes on. The old man is silent. He hugs her. It’s that he wanted to end it all–he’s tired of living, and then, there are all these medicines. And nobody comes to see him. He’s alone. Anna cheers him up, promising she’ll be back to visit him, and he hugs her again.

Chamomile tea and god. It’s like reading the Pope’s words in Caritas in Veritate: “One of the deepest forms of poverty a person can experience is isolation. If we look closely at other kinds of poverty, including material forms, we see that they are born from isolation, from not being loved, or from difficulties in being able to love. Poverty is often produced by a rejection of God’s love...” (Chapter 5, line 53). Being loved. This is the only way a person can start anew, only through an embrace that makes you perceive that “love of God.” But who can embrace this way?
Franchi says that after a meeting with a group of Solidarity Food Bank friends, a woman came up to them. “I’m the wife of an ex-terrorist. I’ve lived through terrible years; I didn’t leave the house anymore. For a long time, I hadn’t seen anyone. Then, two women came knocking on my door. They’d heard I was in difficulty and they wanted to bring me a bag of food every 15 days. I accepted. Then, I began to understand that it wasn’t ‘those two women’ ringing my doorbell; it was Jesus. Every two weeks, He returned to my house to give hope to a woman who’d lost it. Today I, too, bring groceries, to thank God for coming to get me at home, and to remind me of who I am.”
When someone is charitable in this way, when someone is capable of that embrace, what do those who receive the groceries see? Miriam from Pesaro tells us. She visits a grandmother who lives with her daughter and two granddaughters. “She’s struck by the way we do charitable work. ‘There are lots of ways people do charity, but yours is different,’ she told me once. One evening, I brought her some packets of chamomile tea that the supermarket was going to throw away because they were outside the box. A few days later, she told me, ‘Every evening, when I stir the chamomile tea for my granddaughters, I realize... I realize that that chamomile is a sign of God.’”