Rikers Island

“Visitor for Dawkins,” shouts the corrections officer.
I am at the edge of my metal chair, but in my nervousness, fail to recognize the name.
“Dawkins?” he repeats.

I leap up, nod at him and enter. I sit at another metal chair, arranged in a row next to mostly African American women. Everyone’s removed his or her footwear. I do the same, unzipping my boots. I have already been subjected to an ionic scan for narcotics. Now I get called for frisking. A female officer ensures I’m not smuggling in any contraband. I have a tiny metal hair clip in my pocket. The officer asks me to pin it in my hair. I am waved through.

I walk through double doors into a large cafeteria-like hall. It is filled with plastic furniture in bright, primary colors. Child-sized green, yellow, blue, and red chairs and tables fill the linoleum floors. African American men at an average height of six feet occupy them, their long legs squeezed uncomfortably in the tiny space between the tables and chairs.

I walk to table 66. It is a bright yellow. I sit on a plastic chair and wait for Dawkins. I don’t remember how he looked in court. He had been in a gray sweatshirt, but usually had his back turned to me. I have never seen him from close quarters.

Men stream in and hug and kiss their women. They are young. The women are even more so, and many have babies. Their grittiness belies their age. It is touching to see young fathers reuniting with their sons and daughters, but I remember the young boy sitting next to me on the bus to Rikers Island.

Crossing the bridge into the prison, a young boy, probably all of five, sat next to me. His gray hoodie was drawn over his head, his blue eyes partly shaded. His grandmother accompanied him. Rikers is no place for a child on a Sunday morning, I thought. What drives men to commit crimes even when knowing their responsibilities, knowing that they have their sons and daughters to care for?

Dawkins arrives. He looks like his dad, but younger and taller. I pump his hand nervously thinking, ‘the same hands that killed twice.’ He sits opposite me, and I introduce myself. He wears a gray jumpsuit, torn at the crotch. He has seven tattoos, none from prison, he assures me. Tattoos acquired in prison are a sign of gang affiliation. We talk.

I ask him at one point why he was carrying a steak knife in his pocket at the age of 14? Dawkins stabbed a boy in the neck, severing a major artery and killing him—his first murder. It is a silly question. Growing up in Jamaica, Queens at the height of the crack epidemic, it would be silly not to.

He smiles, his first smile. It lights up his face, revealing for an instant something deeper, a shade of the personality he has been hiding. His lightly bearded cheek dimples.
Then it closes up. He launches into his lie, repeating it again and again with increasing pitch and crescendo. He touches my knee to reinforce his point. My body strains against the light touch.

I am disappointed. I expected an ideal character for my narrative, but the perfect is often the exception rather than the rule. He is what he is, perfectly human.

Food pantries face increased demand as jobs lost

By Gayathri Vaidyanathan

Two three-year-old children stood in the line for food vouchers.  They were a little grubby, their blonde curls tangled, their blue eyes wary.  The girl’s flowered blue pajamas were coarse and dirty; the boy fidgeted.  Their father was tall, unshaven; the mother haggard.  The family looked like they’d forgotten how to smile.

The mother entered the St. Vincent de Paul parish meeting, where they hand out food vouchers for a local supermarket in Jackson Heights, Queens. She said times were difficult.  Her husband was laid off.  She can’t work because she has to watch her kids.  Daycare is too expensive.  She wanted more than the $50 maximum that is given at the parish.

That night, the small parish that usually gives out checks to an average of 25 people hit 34, an all time record.

The story is the same throughout Queens, a bastion of middle and working class families.  Out of 12 soup kitchens and food pantries surveyed in Queens, all said that the demand for their services increased in the past three months.

In the midst of an economic recession, families with children are the hardest hit.  In 2007, more than one in five children were being fed from food pantries, up 48 percent from 2006, according to the Food Bank for New York City.  Now, with the Wall Street crisis, the situation is worsening.

At the bigger Marguerite’s Pantry run by Sister Anne Marie Birne, 65, down the street, the story is the same.  At 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning in October the line for food spilled onto the pavement on 79th Street.  A woman held a fluffy Yorkshire terrier dressed in a red jacket to protect against the biting wind.  Seniors with walkers, women with young kids dressed in pastels, and healthy men lined up for pasta, rice, canned food, and a little bit of meat.

“We’ve run outta numbers,” said Joseph Dagostino, 19, who volunteers at the pantry.  They have tokens with numbers up to 200 that are usually sufficient.  An hour and a half after the pantry opened, all the tokens were given out.  In October, Marguerite’s Pantry gave food to 274 people, 54 of them first timers; usually they serve 185, according to Birne.

“We had more elderly, which is interesting…families with children, and more men than we usually get.  A lot of men are out of work, they are really hurting,” said Birne.

Raoul Osorio, 50, earns $130 a month as a superintendent in his building in Jackson Heights. He lost his second job in construction two months ago. His Adidas New York Mets sweatshirt was neatly pressed and he displayed a photo of his nine-year-old son proudly.

“This morning I bought cheese, eggs and bacon. That’s 15 dollars!” he said.  “That’s not with milk, juice, none of that.  It’s sad.  It’s sad when your son asks you ‘Oh, can I get ice cream?’ and you can’t get it.”

Even before the meltdown on Wall Street, unemployment in New York City rose from 5 to 5.8 percent between July and August, the biggest monthly increase in more than 30 years, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor. Construction workers were among the hardest hit with 2000 construction jobs lost in the state in the past year, according to the New York State Department of Labor.

Jose Ricardo, 29, is a demolition worker from Corona, Queens. Worry lines creased his forehead; this was his first time in the food line at St. Vincent de Paul.  He had one day of work in the past month.  “[I’m at] the brink of self destruction…I have nothing to look forward to anymore. I don’t get the call for work, what am I to do? I can’t make money.  I dip more into my savings. I got two kids,” he said.  Ricardo left before getting to the front of the line.
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Joel Berg, the executive director of New York City Coalition Against Hunger, said that unemployment and underemployment are reasons why more people are showing up for food support.  The situation is the worst he’s seen in seven years.

“It’s the worst of all worlds.  Government is cutting back and private sector is cutting back just at the time these problems are creeping up,” said Berg.  “And it’s an economic downturn in which food prices are increasing, so everything that could go wrong is going wrong.”

Everyone had the same story to tell: a dollar just does not stretch as far anymore.  Gas prices have gone up, utilities and telephone bills have risen.  Food inflation is at an all time high and grocery prices have risen 8.4 percent over the past year, the largest 12-month increase in 21 years, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
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And low-income households with children are the worst hit.  A minimum-wage full time worker in the city earns less than $15,000 a year and in the face of job loss, one in every five families with children would not be able to afford food, according the Food Bank for New York City.

This comes at a time when the Food Bank is facing a shortage of food and decreased funding.  In April 2008, the Food Bank reported getting 59 per cent less than it needs as donors cut back.

“Even as more families have turned to soup kitchens and food pantries for help, support and funding for emergency food has decreased,” according to a Food Bank press release. In 2007, almost half the food pantries were forced to turn people way.  In October 2008, all the Queens pantries surveyed reported turning people away as their food supplies dwindled.

Back at Marguerite’s Pantry, Birne said that she’s cut back on the amount of food she’s giving people. She runs out of rice easily and does not distribute boxed cereal any longer.  She gives out less canned food.  Birne gets $12,000 in federal and state grants for her pantry.  In just three months, she’s used up $7,000.
Wanda Silva, 52, at the Ravenswood Food Pantry, Queens, said that the Food Bank is not sending her as much food as she needs in these times of greater demand. Since June her food pantry has been swamped with seniors and families.

“I have not seen much rice for two months now,” she said. “The companies that are supposed to provide [the Food Bank] with free food are not giving as much because of the economy.”  She orders fresh produce from federal and state grants, but increasing food prices have meant that she can’t order as much.

Jannett Taylor, 58, from Long Island City’s Steinway Child & Family Services, said the same.  “There’s a lot less food.  Less.  Rice has gone down, cereals have gone down.  Canned goods have gone down as well.”  Her food pantry now serves nearly 2,000 people, one and half times more than in June.

At the Salvation Army in Astoria, they ran out of federal and state grant money in the face of increasing demand.  They could not feed anybody for two weeks in October. “There has been an increase in clients, but a decrease in the quantity of food,” said Mable Hunter, social service client advocacy coordinator.  “We haven’t been able to give the usual food amount.  We get grants but they have now run out.”
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The basement of Bethany Baptist Church of Jamaica was suffused with the smell of fish in early October.  Outside the sun beat down on the bleak streets of a neighborhood dominated by project housing.  Geraldine Crenshaw, 75, presided over her thrice-weekly soup kitchen and food pantry.  Men and women straggled in wearing faded, cheap clothing.

Crenshaw usually feeds around 900 people every week but over the past month she consistently hit more than 1,000.  And sometimes she runs out of food, she said.

“There’s people coming in now that we’ve never had before, a whole lotta outsiders now coming in now,” she said.  “Now before we even open the door…the crowd is all the way around the church waiting…to get in.  That’s how much it has increased.  Before you’d see a small gathering.”

She laid the blame on the economy: “A lotta people are unemployed…the economy is at the peak now where it requires people to go [to food pantries] and they have children to feed.”

Marie Jean, 52, immigrated to Jamaica, Queens from Haiti four years ago. Her multicolored turban and sequined sweater lent some color to the excess of drab blue clothing in the basement. In recent times, she said, “With my money, I can buy just a little bit.  Life is difficult.”

Is life better in New York than Haiti?

“It’s different,” she said with a grimace.