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After just moving from a fairly large city to a rural area, I found myself needing financial help (I live on disability which is an incredibly small amount). I was informed of two local churches who give free groceries to the needy, and filled out their information cards. I'd like to tell individual stories here, in this forum, of the people I met. I went for the first time, yestereday, and while being a somewhat depressing event, I met a group of regulars that I'd like to talk about. Daisy was the obvious leader of the table. She sat, bolt upright in her chair, and looked like someone used to being on a throne. She was massively large, the cords to her neck, huge and muscular. She had hands that had seen many years of hard work. She had a typical coiffure of the rural south--a mullet with tiny ringlets on top, and board straight settling under, against the back of her neck. I asked to join their table and she said that of course I could. I looked around--there was another large woman, noticeably in worse shape, sitting in a wheelchair, named Ginnie ("spelled with a G, she promptly told me"). Next to Daisy was a tiny, short woman with impossibly black, short somewhat choppy hair, and she was leaning into Daisy's side. She seemed to have difficulties speaking and would whisper to Daisy whenever she wanted to join the group conversation ("Tell her she's just a baby, " she said upon my answering what my age was). Daisy and Ginnie informed me of how this whole procedure worked. It seems that you took a number, sat at a table in this church gymnasium, waiting for them to call out, "First twenty!" Upon this time, the line would start. When you realized that the number of the back of the line was getting close to your own, you stood in line. Upon reaching the front, you presented your drivers license, told them how many in your family, and they issued you a thin blue strip of paper with the number written in ink. From there, you proceeded to two different stations upon which they handed you a sack of groceries. Then you proceeded to stand in line to pick up your meal. Then you sat down, ate, talked and left with your groceries. I was so thoroughly confused this first week about how someone like myself (disabled, as many there were) could carry the groceries, coordinate them, and carry both my meal and takeout meals that I could take home for the rest of my brood, that I didn't get much of a chance to speak to the ladies. However, they have asked me back, and I hope to hear everyone's stories in weeks to come.
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