As we enter Christmas week, I was very moved by Staff Writer Mary Pols’ fine piece on Freeport Community Services’ food delivery program (Dec. 19). It casts a spotlight on a little-known or -understood, brave effort to address an all-too-prevalent and shameful problem in Maine and, indeed, in America: hunger and poverty.

For the last two-plus years, I’ve been cheffing one day a week at Brunswick’s Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Project, making a hot lunch for 100 to 150 people.

Like the one in Freeport, this program is filled with such good people – underpaid, well-meaning staff and oft times aging volunteers, like me, who sincerely want to help the needy and the unfortunate in their communities. They do so much with so little – on the personal level, it’s heartwarming and lovely.

And yet, on the political level, aren’t we but a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage? I often worry that I am just helping to take the pressure off the much larger problem of poverty and lack of adequate social services, living wage, health care and housing provided by our government. We are so backward compared to other so-called “First World” countries, it is shocking and embarrassing.

People who think the poor are just takers and freeloaders should visit my lunchroom any Monday at 11 a.m. and see for themselves what it looks like as the ill, poor, hungry and desperate queue up for a meal and some companionship in a warm and welcoming place. It does not make me proud to be an American, I can tell you that.

I’d love to see Mary Pols bring her great reporting skills, empathy and insight to bear on the larger question of how badly the poor are served in Maine. Hopefully with our incoming Democratic governor, Janet Mills, things will take a turn for the better. There is a very long way to go.

Dede Wilder

Brunswick

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