SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
Donation Goal: 600.” Eight dated
entries stretched down the board
to the current date, Nov. 16.
“417,” the employee called back
to Ames.
“I’m not in panic mode any-
more,” Ames said from behind
her mask. “Last Monday, I
thought, ‘Okay, motormouth,
what are you going to do?’ But the
community has shown up in a big
way.”
Ames and other volunteers
blitz social media with Facebook
posts and memes asking for do-
nations. Local churches, the War-
renton fire department and po-
lice department, and schools all
responded by buying turkeys and
donating them to the pantry. Now
200 shy of the goal, Ames felt
confident the charitable momen-
tum that had carried the drive
this far would make up the differ-
ence before the giveaway this
week.
She fumbled with the door on a
refrigerator truck, pulling open
the latch and staring at the
mountain of turkeys she had
collected over the course of a
week in a year unlike any Ames
had seen working at the food
pantry.
Somewhere in the stacked
poultry was a turkey for a War-
renton woman named Teresa.
(She declined to give her last
name.) This week, she would take
the meat home with the rest of
the donated food for her husband
and their four children between
the ages of 5 and 15. Since 2018,
she had been making regular
stops at the pantry. Ames and
everyone else always remem-
bered her name, remembered the
names of her kids and even let her
pick up extra items when the
family needed them.
Teresa had been stopping by
more regularly since March. Her
husband’s work hours had been
reduced. The kids weren’t in
school. “I don’t want to be weird
and say that my kids need to go to
school to eat, but.. .” she said
before stopping. “It just feels like
we’re always taking two steps
forward and one back.”
On a recent stop at the pantry,
she had signed up for the Thanks-
giving meal.
“How important is it to have a
turkey?” she said. “It’s not neces-
sary. I want to have a Thanksgiv-
ing. But I guess this is the new
normal. It’s weird. My 5-year-old
will never know what it was like
before all this. So is it important?
No. It’s important that we eat.”
[email protected]your neighbors.”‘Two steps forward
a nd one back’
It was nearly noon. A half-doz-
en people were already lined up
outside the Fauquier Community
Food Bank, each clutching a
number from a dispenser like the
ones sitting on deli counters.
When the distribution began, the
numbers would be called, and
one by one each person would be
led through the aisles inside to
pick groceries.
Tugging on a black mask print-
ed with the pantry’s name, Ames
swung around toward the load-
ing dock. “How many we got
now?”
An employee glanced at the
whiteboard topped with “Turkeywho recently walked in the door
and said he had heard country
music legend Willie Nelson say to
donate to local food banks, so he
had come to open his wallet.
Forbes has also forged new
arrangements with local farmers;
the food bank is now getting
weekly milk deliveries from a
nearby dairy that had been pro-
viding milk to schools before the
pandemic.
Still, she said one of her biggest
issues is overcoming the “country
pride” of locals who resist taking
the help. “There are people who
have lived here all their lives, and
some will come to us and say, ‘I
don’t want to accept help from
the government.’ Well, you are
not getting help from the govern-
ment. You are getting help fromI get calls on different days from
people saying, ‘I have a ride now;
can I come today?’ So I have to
make arrangements for that.”
Wheeler was also expecting
200 families for the Thanksgiving
distribution, but she was running
low on the main course.
“I have some turkeys, but I
don’t have enough for everyone,”
she said. “So those will go to ones
that have children or have multi-
ple people in the house. I’m trying
to make sure they do have a
holiday. For single people, I’m
making sure they will have some-
thing like chicken.”
Forbes’s Rappahannock Pantry
— in a county with 14.6 percent
food insecurity — has been
buoyed by local donations, like
the older man in a cowboy hat“So we’ve put it out to the
community asking for donations,
and we’ve found some places
where we can buy 10 or 15 here
and there. We’ve gotten enough
to get some through, and if we
don’t have them we’ll sub in a
whole chicken.”
Shirley Wheeler from the Mis-
sionary Chestnut Grove Food
Bank in Appomattox County —
16.1 percent food insecure — usu-
ally did one mass distribution
doing the month. But the pan-
demic has forced her to retool her
operation, staying open longer or
meeting people in the communi-
ty with food.
“We are in a rural area, so
transportation is a big problem,”
she said. “People have to get rides
the day we give out food. But nowincome sources have been less
conventional.
“Our thrift stores are packed
full,” Shaffer said. “One good
thing about the pandemic is peo-
ple have been at home clearing
out their stuff, so we’re seeing a
lot of donations, and we’re en-
couraging people to come buy
local.”
Shaffer was still looking for the
200 turkeys she needed for the
holiday. The pipelines providing
food to major grocery chains
began jamming up in the early
days of the pandemic, and the
system has still not fully recov-
ered, which is evident in rising
prices and the reluctance among
chains to fill large orders.
TURKEYS FROM A
JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POSTSharon Ames, center, executive director of the Fauquier Community Food Bank and Thrift Store, thanks Fauquier County’s deputy administrator, Erin Kozanecki, for her
food donations on Tuesday. Meanwhile, R ick Pulver, with Bealeton Baptist Church, prepares to distribute food to families i n Warrenton, Va.
Anthony S. Fauci, Director,National Institute of Allergy andInfectious DiseasesHosted by The Post’s Robert Costaon Monday, Nov. 23 at 1:00 p.m. ETTo register visit: wapo.st/fauci