Poverty Hidden in Georgetown Schools

Published in the Sun February 15, 2014

“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it.  There should not be a district of one square mile, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”

John Adams, US President, 1785

Rob Dyer, principal of Mitchell Elementary School, visited one of his students at home last November.  The child lived out a county road in a broken down Winnebago camper with no electricity.  Daddy was working in another town.  A garden hose in the yard provided water.  A toilet in the camper could be flushed by pouring a bucket into it, washing the sewage into a pit behind the house.  Mom cooked on a propane burner in a metal shed attached to the camper.  She was working a minimum wage job as a caregiver, but with an infant to take along with her, a four year old to pick up from pre-k at noon, and a seven year old to pick up in mid-afternoon, it was difficult to make ends meet.  Luckily, Rob and his staff were able to help get the four year old enrolled in Head Start, and Backpack Buddies sent the seven year old home with a bag of food every weekend.  Unfortunately, this family is not particularly unusual at Mitchell.

Most of us like to think of Georgetown as an affluent community:  techies, university professors, and comfortable retirees soaking up suburban bliss between exotic vacations.  Maybe so, but the schools here exist in an alternate universe.  Of the 4,941 students in Georgetown’s elementary schools, almost 57% are economically disadvantaged and qualify for free or reduced price lunch and breakfast.  A family of four with an annual income less than $42,000 qualifies for reduced lunch prices, meaning that thanks to money from the US Department of Agriculture a child pays 40 cents instead of $2.20 for a nutritious lunch.  At Mitchell Elementary in southeast Georgetown, 73% of the children qualify for free or reduced lunches.  Mr. Dyer knows for sure that many of those kids are not gathering around the family table for meatloaf and peas in the evening.  In fact, some don’t get supper at all and are really hungry for a school breakfast the next day.

At this point some reader will be compelled to write to me explaining that dried beans are highly nutritious and cost only $1.20 a pound so there is no reason for any child to go to bed hungry.  Just be forewarned that if you actually write such a letter you will be conscripted to organize and teach the Mitchell dried bean education project.

Due to some special food service grants, Mitchell Elementary is able to provide free breakfast to all students, without regard to their socioeconomic status.  Mr. Dyer prefers the free-for-all approach.  For one thing, nobody is singled out as a free-breakfast kid, and frankly a lot of rich kids are missing breakfast too, just because it’s hard to get breakfast if you are already late for the bus.  He and his daughter frequently enjoy the convenience of breakfast at school.  He points out that when kids start the day well-fed they pay attention in school and have fewer behavior problems.  He seems a bit embarrassed about advocating that lunch and breakfast be provided for all his students as part of the school’s mission.  “I have very conservative values, but there are some things that are sacred, and caring for kids is one of those sacred values.”  He wants his kids to be healthy, happy, and productive, and feeding them is pretty basic to that goal.

Mr. Dyer goes on to explain that many people think poverty means the parents are sitting around watching TV, looking for a government handout.  He knows what his school families are doing, where they are living and where they are working because they have to provide that information when they register for school.  He says the vast majority are working, but a minimum wage job at $7.25 an hour will pay $15,000 a year if it is full time and lasts all year.  Even if both parents worked for that much, the children would still qualify for the lunch program.  Median rent in Georgetown is over $900 a month, or $11,000 a year, which doesn’t leave much left over for utilities and groceries.  Many Mitchell families are doubled up in rent houses, some even in rented rooms, and how do you get to your minimum wage job when the car breaks down?

I asked Mr. Dyer if he could wave a magic wand and get anything for his kids, besides food, what would it be?  He didn’t hesitate.  He would have a city-wide grid of safe, filtered WiFi.  A laptop computer for every child would be the icing on the cake.  That way, even if the home could not afford internet access, the child (and the parents) could be computer literate in this modern world where computer literacy is just as necessary as reading.  To illustrate his point he pulls out a map.  A mobile home community in Mitchell’s district just east of town was an internet desert until a tech-savvy donor installed a WiFi transmitter for less than $500.  Now the kids can keep up with the teachers’ webpages, do their homework and research, and the parents can use it as well.  Over 57 American cities have begun providing some level of municpal WiFi, and the smart ones are basing it on a high speed fiberoptic network that also attracts industry.  Mr. Dyer points out that Belton is setting up a city-wide municipal network through the Belton Wireless Project.  If Belton can do it, surely Georgetown can.  After all, if we are going to demand free wireless in our coffee shops, shouldn’t we insist on it for all of our students?

Recycling Doubles Under Single-Stream

Published in the Sun February 13, 2014

Thursday is trash day on my street.  On Thursday mornings, as far as the eye can see in both directions, the curb is punctuated with 95 gallon bins.  Two sit in front of each house, one with a black lid and the other tan, all arranged neatly against the curb before 7 AM.  Compliance of this degree is rarely seen in our individualistic society, but we are highly motivated to get rid of our trash.

The average American generates 4.4 pounds of municipal waste every day, 1606 pounds every year.  A family of four would generate more than 3 tons of waste annually.  Being orderly people, we want that waste to go away promptly so we are not buried under a mountain of junk mail, food boxes, and yard trimmings.  Of course, the trash doesn’t really “go away”, as in disappear forever.  It just changes location.  The final destination for Georgetown trash is the Texas Disposal Systems (TDS) landfill and recycling facility at Creedmoor, southeast of Austin. 

In the fall of 2012, Georgetown began single-stream recycling.  When the 95 gallon recycling bins first arrived, many customers complained that they were too big and wanted to trade them in for smaller versions.  At my house there was no complaining.  We fill that sucker every time.  The trash, on the other hand has diminished to approximately one small kitchen bag a week.  In fact, the kitchen trash usually gets taken out because it is stinky, not because it is full.  Friends have told me that they generate so little trash it seems a waste of effort to push the bin down the driveway every week.

I asked Verna Browning, Community Relations Manager at TDS, how we are doing at single-stream recycling.  In the month before the new bins were delivered, Georgetown recycled 244 tons of material.  We have more than doubled that amount to 503 tons in December 2013.  That means about 6000 tons of material were diverted away from the landfill this past year.  Sun City seems to be doing the most recycling, which should give the rest of us some competitive motivation to get on the stick.

Although the recycled materials have economic worth as raw materials, the real savings comes from preserving landfill space.  Building new landfills is outrageously expensive.  Wasting stuff has never been a really good economic strategy.

In addition to recycling, Georgetown elementary schools are also composting their lunchroom waste.  The children are taught to separate their trash as they leave the cafeteria.  Food, milk cartons, and napkins go for composting.  Water bottles and aluminum cans go into single-stream recycling.  What can’t be recycled goes into the trash.  This small discipline on the part of these young children results in about 7 pounds of waste per child per month being diverted from the landfill.  In the middle schools, which are not yet composting, less than 1 pound per student per month is recycled.  You might look at these numbers and ask why the middle schoolers are recycling so little, or you might also ask why the little kids are wasting so much food!

Ms. Browning has three reminders for readers who want to be good recyclers.  First, 13% of the stuff that gets put in the recycling containers is inappropriate and belongs in the regular trash so look at the list of recyclable items at http://recycle.georgetown.org.  Styrofoam cannot be recycled so please put it in the regular trash (or better yet, don’t use Styrofoam.)   If you recycle boxes, be sure that all Styrofoam inserts have been removed.  Second, if you want to recycle your plastic bags and plastic film wrappers, they must be put into a yellow stuffer bag available from the city.  Putting them inside another plastic bag is not good enough because the bags break and jam up the recycling equipment.  If you don’t want to get a yellow stuffer bag then all plastic films and bags must be put in the trash.  Third, yard waste composting will begin in March.  Yard waste must be put in compostable paper bags or in a container clearly marked “Yard Waste” in big letters.  If your leaves are in a black plastic bag, they will go to the landfill.

Gardeners consider bagged leaves a valuable commodity for the compost pile.  Bags that contain only leaves are welcome at Getsemani Community Garden at the corner of Church and East 20^th Street.

These items DO NOT belong in recycling bins:  Styrofoam, loose plastic bags, hazardous waste (chemicals and paint), pet food bags, pet waste, lightbulbs, batteries, aerosol cans, motor oil containers, coat hangars, clothing, garden hoses, potato chip bags, wine corks, single use coffee cups, yard waste.

A Win-Wind Deal for Georgetown

Published in the Sun January 25, 2014

If you are interested in renewable energy, something extremely remarkable happened in Georgetown last year.  Our fair city, with no fanfare whatsoever, approved and signed a contract with a wind farm that could provide over 85% of our electricity when it comes on line in 2015.  That much wind power in our portfolio will definitely put us on the top shelf of cities committed to renewable energy.

Georgetown has entered a 20 year agreement with EDF Renewable Energy for half the power produced by Spinning Spur 3, a 194 megawatt wind farm under construction in Oldham County Texas, 50 miles west of Amarillo.  Garland Texas is taking the other half.  (Spinning Spur 1 is partially owned by Google, which has a long-term goal of 100% renewable energy.)  Jim Briggs, general manager of utilities, can’t disclose the exact price we will be paying when the wind farm is completed, but it is very competitive with electricity generated from natural gas.  So competitive in fact, that Mr. Briggs expects he will eventually be able to decrease customer rates for a kilowatt-hour of electricity, lowering our utility bills.

West Texas wind power has recently been selling for historic low prices, as low as $28 per megawatt-hour (2.8 cents per kilowatt-hour) and Georgetown’s cost for wind energy is now locked in for the next 20 years at today’s low price.  In contrast, the price of electricity from natural gas fluctuates every fifteen minutes.  It is cheap when demand is low, but when the weather turns bad and demand skyrockets, like it did during the recent Polar Vortex or like it routinely does on August afternoons, wholesale electricity prices frequently shoot up to $500/megawatt-hour, and in a real pinch can go as high as $5000/megawatt-hour.  It doesn’t take too many hours of the high prices to burn through anything you saved with cheap gas during off hours.

Georgetown will be contracting for so much wind power that during the early morning and late night hours we won’t be able to use it all, and excess power will be sold to ERCOT at a profit.  During the mid afternoon, the wind won’t quite cover all our demand, so that is when we will fulfill our other old contracts for fossil fuel energy.  Of course mid afternoon is a wonderful time for solar generation.  As some of those old energy contracts expire, Mr. Briggs is looking for some competitively priced commercial solar projects to cover that expensive midday gap when cities and businesses scramble for enough electricity to keep the air conditioning on.

Besides not emitting greenhouse gases and not being dependent on a global fuel commodity, wind energy has another great advantage for a hot, dry state.  It does not require water.  Coal fired power plants use hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water every year for cooling.  Fracking for natural gas also requires large amounts of water to be injected into the wells.  Ironically, Texas may run out of water before we run out of natural gas.

One might well ask how Georgetown became a green energy city so suddenly and without the usual civic angst that might accompany a convention center or a drive-through hamburger stand.  A number of stars aligned to create this “windfall.”  First, Texas has installed a lot of wind turbines, leading the nation in wind energy.  Since wind farms do not have big batteries, when the electricity is generated it has to be sold.  Second, competitive renewable energy zone (CREZ) transmission lines were recently completed and allow electricity from west Texas wind farms to be brought to the population centers such as Dallas, Houston, and Austin.  Third, and most fortuitous for us, the federal production tax credits (PTC) for wind energy were set to expire on December 31, 2013.  To be eligible for the PTC, EDF Renewable Energy had to have contracts for Spinning Spur 3 in place by the end of the year.  In other words, a little breeze blew Georgetown Utilities through a very narrow window of opportunity to purchase clean energy for less than dirty energy would cost.  Thank you, Mr. Briggs and the Georgetown City Council, for not closing the window.

Table Saw Story

Published in the Sun January 19, 2014

Habitat volunteer using a table saw without safety guards

As an occasional but timid user of a table saw, I was fascinated by the picture in the January 8 edition of the Sun which showed a man, presumably a Habitat for Humanity volunteer, ripping a small piece of wood on a table saw.  All blade guards and safety devices have been removed from the saw.  The man is not identified, but the wrinkles of his hand suggest he is a carpenter of many years experience.  He is wisely using a stick to push the wood through the saw, but his left hand is holding the wood steady, and is about an inch from the blade.  He appears to have all his fingers.

I personally know two experienced carpenters who have lost multiple fingers to encounters with saws.  One of them is Matt Scavarelli, the father of my son-in-law.  Matt’s story occurred on March 26, 1989 at 8:05 pm.  He remembers the time exactly, because his wife had just yelled down to his home shop that he should quit for the evening.  Matt, a carpenter for almost 40 years, was working late trying to finish some kitchen cabinets for a client.  He told his wife he would make just one more cut.  He was ripping a piece of wood on a radial arm saw, which is generally a safer saw than the table saw in the picture.  Suddenly the wood “kicked back” and he felt like he had slammed his right thumb is a car door.  Then he looked.  Half his thumb and index finger were gone, and his middle finger was hanging by some flesh.  At that moment he was sure his career was finished. 

In the emergency room the surgeon gave him a choice.  He could have the three fingers amputated, or he could undergo multiple surgeries to reattach the fingers, but they would most likely stick out uselessly and never function properly.  Matt chose the amputations.

The accident was physically and psychologically devastating.  Matt had been working with power saws since he was a kid and had never had so much as a splinter.  He had lost all fear of his equipment.  That confidence, combined with hurrying to finish up and the fatigue of a long day, caused an accident that put him into rehabilitation for a year.  He was right-handed, so he had to learn new ways to do everything, from zippering his jacket to picking up small objects.  He had to learn to write.  He learned to use his carpentry tools again, but his hand was so weak he needed a lighter hammer.  He still can’t properly open a bag of potato chips.

Matt had to rehabilitate mentally as well.  As he describes the process, you mourn the loss of part of your body the same way you would mourn the loss of a friend.  The loss was made even more difficult by phantom pain in the missing fingers.  He had suffered with arthritis in the tip of his index finger.  After the accident he could still feel the pain of the arthritis, even though the affected joint was gone. 

Matt is also self-conscious about his hand and notices people staring at it.  It’s awkward at social events.  People are reluctant to shake a hand that has three fingers missing.

Habitat for Humanity is a super organization that has done wonderful things in Georgetown.  I hope their volunteers will be very careful with the saws, put the safety equipment back on, and keep their hands away from the blade.  An estimated 4000 amputations a year in the US result from power saw accidents, mostly fingers of course.  Although he still uses power saws in his work, Matt has retained a healthy respect.  As he puts it, “The machine has no conscience.”

Published in the Sun Dec 28, 2013

“We live on the edge of a desert, and our yards are going to look like that.”  These are not the words of a latte-sipping, electric-car-driving, rainwater-collecting environmentalist.  (You thought I was nagging at you again, didn’t you?)  These are the words of John Hofmann, manager of the central and lower basins of the Brazos River Authority, the man ultimately responsible for Georgetown’s water supply.  He means that if we want to continue to have clean, abundant water coming out of our faucets in 2050, we need to stop pouring it on the grass.

It should be a simple message.  Our lake is only 53% full after what seems like a wet fall, even though we are pumping water from Lake Stillhouse in an effort to keep it filled.  The time has come for a paradigm shift on how we use water.  If we are going to have enough water for all the people who already live here, plus the ones who are arriving every day, we will need to use less.  Back to Mr. Hofmann, “You have to raise rates.  Everybody thinks about water like it’s a birthright because it’s so cheap.”  He adds this admonition, “You need to be shooting for under 150 gallons per person per day.”  Georgetown residents currently use over 200 gallons of water per person per day.  The only way to achieve that kind of conservation (unless we want to seriously sacrifice personal hygiene) is to change the way we water our yards.

In addition to advocating conservation, Mr. Hofmann’s presentation to the Chisholm Trail Special Utility District on December 19 also included a lot of information about potential new water resources for the Brazos G region which includes Williamson County and 36 other Texas counties from the lower Panhandle to Navasota in the southeast.

The Bel-house Connector is a $500 million, 8 mile pipeline which would bring water from Lake Belton to Stillhouse Hollow.  For years, Georgetown has been paying more than $600,000 a year for rights to water in Lake Belton, even though the pipeline doesn’t yet exist.  To bring this pipeline to fruition, the BRA still needs to acquire the right-of-way for the pipeline, and get the approval of politicians in Bell County.  Since Belton, Killeen, Copperas Cove, and Harker Heights have all managed to get their own water consumption below 160 gallons per capita per day, the politicians up there may not be so keen to share water from their own growing constituency with water-hog neighbors to the south.  If all the cards fall into place, and if we can get our consumption down to an acceptable level, the Bel-house connector would provide enough water for Williamson County until 2050.  After that we will need to find more.

Another possibility is to build a new lake near Cameron called the Little River Off-Channel Reservoir.  This new reservoir, which would cost $137 million to build and almost $12 million a year to run, would provide about 27,000 acre feet of water per year, or 24 million gallons per day.  To put that number in perspective, the city of Georgetown all by itself can consume over 27 million gallons of water on a hot summer day, two-thirds of which goes – you guessed it - onto the grass.

There are, however, people who oppose the construction of the Little River reservoir.  The resulting lake would submerge over 4000 acres of ranchland.  If your family had been ranching near Cameron for 150 years, you might not be in favor of having your land confiscated so that city slickers can grow posies in the yard.

All water planning in Texas is predicated on a worst case scenario similar to the “drought of record,” our dry spell in the early 1950s.  Mr. Hofmann points out that the “drought of record” is only based on 100 years of data, while historic evidence suggests Texas has experienced droughts much worse than that one.  He also notes that the last 30 years have been some of the wettest in central Texas history, allowing a growth rate that may not be sustainable if the area reverts to a drier climate again.  In summary, the future may have less water filling our lakes, and more people sucking it out.

 

 

Knowing What Is In Your Food

Published in the Sun 12-18-2013

The US Food and Drug Administration recently announced that “trans” fats are not safe to consume at any level, meaning that food manufacturers would have to remove all trans fats from their products.  This move by the FDA has prompted cries of “nanny state” and “excess government regulation,” so I have been thinking a bit about what exactly is “excess government regulation.”

If you want to sell me a scarf you knitted, and I want to buy it, we would probably all agree that transaction is our personal business and the government does not need to be involved. 

What if you want to sell me a 32 ounce sugary cola drink, and I know that drinking large quantities of sugary cola drinks will eventually predispose me to obesity and diabetes?  Should the government allow me to buy that drink even though it is harmful to my health?  I think most of us in Texas, the home of personal responsibility, would still say yes, I have a constitutional right to make stupid decisions.  If I can dodge feral hogs at 85 mph on Texas 130, surely I can handle a Big Gulp.

Let’s go a couple of steps further and suppose that I make a loaf of bread that looks pretty and smells nice, but secretly contains a deadly poison that will kill you after one bite.  Should I be allowed to sell that to you?  Of course not, you gasp.  That would be murder.  I should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.  (In this case my imprisonment would be retroactive government regulation.)

Okay, those were the easy questions.  Now it gets tougher.  Remember the can of Crisco that your mom had on the back of the stove?  Crisco was short for crystallized cottonseed oil.  Cottonseed oil, a waste product from the cotton industry, was originally used to make soap and lamp oil.  A chemist discovered that if hydrogen was bubbled through cottonseed oil, it made a white, semi-solid grease that worked great for frying chicken and fish.  As a shortening, it also gave baked goods a lovely brown color and a longer shelf life.  Partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (also called PHOs or trans fats) were thought to be a healthy alternative to lard and rapidly made their way into almost all of our commercially baked breads and cookies, margarines, frostings, and even coffee creamers.  These miraculous oils seemed like real business winners, until it was discovered that they were causing many thousands of heart attacks annually in the US.

Trans fats have a different chemical structure than natural vegetable oils.  Unfortunately, our bodies use oils from our diet to make things like cell membranes, so if we ingest abnormal oils, we can expect abnormal results over the long term.  Just like one cigarette won’t kill you, one trans fat loaded cinnamon roll won’t knock you off right away.  But over the long term, even a tiny increase in the amount of trans fat in the diet increases the risk of heart disease by as much as 30%.

Since 2006 the FDA has required food makers to list trans fat as a separate ingredient on nutrition labels.  Public shame turned out to be quite an effective form of government regulation, because food companies fell all over themselves to remove the trans fat from their products, rather than admit that they were using PHOs.  These days, most of the foods in the grocery store that still admit to containing a lot of trans fats are margarines, frostings and baked goods that have frostings, like cinnamon rolls.  Unfortunately the labeling law has a loophole.  If a product contains less than half a gram per serving it could still be labeled as 0 grams of trans fat, so if you eat processed food every day you can still get enough to harden your arteries.  At the grocery store you can read the fine print to find which products contain PHOs, but restaurants are more difficult, unless you carry a biochemistry lab around in your purse.  I can’t know which foods have trans fat in them, and often the restaurant people don’t know themselves, so I can’t really make an informed decision about what is safe to eat.  A bit of government regulation over my food doesn’t bother me in the least.  We actually have these government regulations because people used to get poisoned by their food regularly, and not in a gradual way.

Of course, many restaurant owners want to keep trans fat out of their food just because it is the right thing to do.  I eat lunch every Friday with a group of friends at Bob’s Catfish-N-More in San Gabriel Park.  Bob McMinn, a former paramedic, was “green as a snake” about nutrition when he first got into the restaurant business in 1979.  When he opened Catfish-N-More he bought 50 pound blocks of hydrogenated soy oil to fry his catfish.  It was what everybody did.  When he learned about the health dangers of trans fat 20 years ago, he switched over to canola oil.  It’s more expensive but it lasts longer, and lets him feel better about his customers eating fried food.  He laughs and admits, “This ain’t no therapeutic diet kitchen!”  He doesn’t serve dessert because he figures that fried food is indulgence enough for his customers.  You can however get a big sugary cola if you think you can handle it.

Bob McMinn at Catfish-N-More

Pass the Cranberry Jelly, Please

Published in the Sun Nov 27, 2013

Winnie Bowen, 7 year volunteer at the Caring Place, helps a client select groceries

I am a procrastinator when it comes to Thanksgiving dinner.  Every year, 25 members of the family show up at my house, expecting a delicious meal in a delightfully festive environment.  So here I am lying awake at 5:00 AM on the Friday before Thanksgiving, deciding what to serve and wondering how much of the house absolutely must be cleaned to avoid disgrace.

Green bean casserole, of course, and cranberry jelly.  My kids like cranberry jelly right out of a can, carefully sliced so the can marks are a visible testament to authenticity.  That’s as far as I get on the menu before my mind wanders and I starting wondering about people who don’t have the luxury of being picky about their groceries during the holidays.

Curious about food insecurity, I head over to the Caring Place to meet Rita Turner, director of community engagement.  Rita tells me that although to the casual observer Georgetown looks like an affluent community, an increasing number of families have a hard time putting food on the table.  Part of the increased demand may be due to the recent reduction in federal food stamp benefits that went into effect November 1, 2013.

Playing devil’s advocate I challenge Rita to respond to the claim that some people would rather use food stamps than get a job and she snorts dismissively, “Nobody’s getting rich off food stamps.”  The maximum benefit for a family of four calculates to $1.76 per meal per person.  In other words, what I might casually spend on a morning latte would be a day’s worth of food stamps for an eligible child.  Last month in Williamson County, over 28,000 people received food stamps; 57% of them were children.

Rita further explains that most of the food pantry clients at the Caring Place are disabled or elderly and are not candidates for jobs anyway.  In 2012, the Caring Place distributed enough food for almost 600,000 meals.

While Rita and I are talking, my friend Jodie Steger walks out of a room where she interviews potential clients.  Jodie screens people in private and finds out what financial crisis has caused the need for emergency assistance and how the Caring Place might help.  She has just interviewed a woman without medical insurance who was hospitalized recently.  The woman may lose her job because of her absence, and can’t afford her new prescriptions.  Jodie can’t help her pay her medical bills from the hospital, but she is able to give her a voucher to purchase her medications at HEB and help her with one week’s worth of food every month for the next three months.  That will help the woman keep enough cash on hand to buy gasoline to get to her job in South Austin, if she doesn’t get fired.

Jodie, who let’s just say is beyond Medicare age and in a comfortable place financially, could be spending her “golden years” doing anything she wants.  What she wanted was to be a social worker.  She went back to Southwestern as a non-traditional student and graduated at age 49 with a degree in sociology.  She volunteers about 15 hours a week at the Caring Place.  She is embarrassed to be interviewed for the newspaper, saying, “I don’t want any credit; it’s not about me.  I just like doing this.  It’s a selfish thing on my part.”  She means of course that the satisfaction she feels from helping people is rich compensation for her efforts. 

I agree that it is not about her, but the Caring Place won’t let me interview a client for privacy reasons, and I can’t interview all 450 volunteers who regularly donate their time and talents to the Caring Place, so Jodie is on the hook simply because she came out of her office at the precise moment that I walked by.  She is one of many, many people who care about our less fortunate neighbors, and are willing to sacrifice both time and money to make a difference.

I ask Jodie the same question I asked Rita; how does she know that the clients aren’t trying to scam the system?  After years of interviewing desperate people in dire financial straits she seems a bit puzzled by my question and thoughtfully replies, “I just believe that everybody deserves food, and shelter, and a safe place to stay.  I would rather help a few people who don’t need it than turn away the ones who do.”

Ginna O’Connor, the new executive director, has joined us and interjects that many people can be just one or two paychecks away from needing assistance.  The Caring Place exists to help those who find themselves in a rough spot.  Jodie recalls refugees from Hurricane Katrina who had nice homes and fancy cars back in New Orleans, but lost everything in the flood.  Misfortune can happen to anybody.

If you are reading this newspaper, chances are that you will spend several hundred dollars (or way more) on your holiday celebrations over the next five weeks.  Do your conscience a favor and go to www.caringplacetx.org (or another charity of your choosing) and help somebody else have a nice holiday as well.  Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”  Improve your world.  That cranberry jelly will be so much sweeter.