The pressing business of feeding the hungry

Note: This is Thanksgiving and I want to stop talk of politics for a week — though political activity still abounds no matter what. It will wait. This is a story about something more pressing: Feeding the hungry. Enjoy your holiday. — PL

BAYVIEW — The blistering heat that marked the summer of 2022 in South Texas has receded by early November, giving way to milder, if not exactly cool, temperatures. It is not enough to eliminate the need for air conditioning, even at night.

Along the lower Texas coast in the Rio Grande Valley, grapefruit and orange trees hang heavy with fruit that will need to be picked in a month or so.

The crops are coming back after a devastating freeze two years ago killed many of the trees here and, while there are still dead trees that litter the landscape, the situation feels as if it is returning to normal.

Except that, in South Texas along the border, life has not been normal for years — long before the temperatures dipped below freezing and now well after.

Some insist the problem is one of politics. If that is true it is politics inextricably intertwined with human lives, poverty, and hunger.

This story is not about politics.

It is about the effort of a Tyler church from a small national denomination linked to a kindred mission in Los Fresnos that attempts, against all odds, to bring a sense of order to chaos and see that ever-changing rules are followed.

If tackling all the issues at the border is akin to a six-course meal, think of this as beans and rice and sometimes just beans. Bag after bag of beans.

Larry Gilliam, an unpaid associate minister at Tyler’s First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), has made more trips over the last 20 years to and from the Southwestern Good Samaritan Ministries in Bayview than he can possibly count.

The Good Samaritan Center — which distributes food, provides a camp-type atmosphere, and can serve as a place to house refugees in times of great need.

He’s come often enough that he was a part of the original camp construction and has been a part of the reconstruction when the original buildings needed repair.

Also uncountable are the pounds of beans and rice he has hauled to the border to feed the hungry. In the most recent trip two weeks ago he took 1,000 pounds of beans and rice given by church members, along with furniture the members gave.

While in the Rio Grande Valley, he bought another 2,400 pounds of beans with monetary donations he was given from Tyler.

Looking the huge pile of beans, one cannot help but imagine eating nothing but that for weeks and months — and yet being thankful that they are set down before them.

Those beans, plus the ones he took with him will last the Good Samaritan Ministries feeding efforts though Christmas.

Maybe.

Then Gilliam will need to find more donors of money and beans to continue feeding. It is never simple or easy but, somehow, the people of Tyler and other churches across the country have always come true.

“I wish I could get people to go so they could understand what is really happening down there,” he said. “If they knew they would help.”

Motivating people to experience the border situation is no simple task, though.

Many believe that they already understand the border situation without seeing it firsthand, others are frightened of stories of violence, still others have succumbed to a particular political view that tells only a tiny slice of the story.

Gilliam is no squishy liberal. He will freely admit to being conservative and dials in to Fox News on his radio, but he understands what is going on here and what the Rev. Feliberto Pereira is trying to accomplish: Keep people from starving.

The Samaritan Center clearly prints its message on signs throughout the facility’s buildings, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

They both take Jesus’ words from Matthew 25:40 to heart and those struggling to live at the border certainly qualify as the “least.”

What it really comes down to is beans and rice, mostly beans.

Enough to fill the bellies of human beings who are hungry. They may be two years old or they may be octogenarians, but they get hungry.

There are very few things that link every human being on the plant. Yes, we all love, but in vastly different ways and for varying reasons. The same is true of feeling anger and elation.

Hunger is one thing that every person feels in the same way. A gnawing in the gut that just won’t go away. It can only be cured in one way: Food. Nothing else will do and it doesn’t take as long as you might think for the body to begin to starve.

Gilliam, Pereira, and many others work at the starvation point. They do so because they believe it is what God commands them to do.

Bringing beans to South Texas is not flashy. They have done this for years with little fanfare and even against some opposition. But they follow the laws and urge migrants to do the same, knowing that it is the only way they can fulfill their mission to feed.

This metaphorical “hill of beans” means nothing to most of us but for the starving it really is life for another day

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