You can help KC's poor children

Op-ed by Sister Berta Sailer
Kansas City Star, 1/3/09, Jan 3 2009

When I began working with poor children in Kansas City in 1967, the minimum wage was $1.40. We didn’t need a food pantry. There were no homeless children. All the children in our school in those days had an address and dinner every night.

Now we teach the children Operation Breakthrough’s address, 3039 Troost Ave., because so many of them have only temporary housing, though their mothers work every day.

We asked one of our 13-year-olds recently what she worries about, and she said, “Rent.” This is a child who has spent more of her life in shelters and soup kitchens than anywhere else.

The earliest memories for one of our 5-year-olds come from the time he lived in an abandoned house, where strangers would come in off the streets all through the night, looking for a place to sleep.

It’s easy to imagine child poverty in Asia or Africa. We’ve all seen the commercials showing sad, dirty children in faraway places. But it’s possible to live here and never see a poor child, the way metropolitan Kansas City is laid out. That worries me.

At Operation Breakthrough, where more than 600 children come every weekday from homeless shelters, foster homes and working-poor families, we don’t have to search for evidence of Kansas City’s child poverty.

We see it on Monday mornings, in the startling amount of breakfast some children eat, after a weekend away. We see it in the cracked skin of a child who can’t bathe because her house has no running water. We see it in a teacher’s written assessment of preschoolers in one of our 22 classrooms:

“Six of these children have been homeless in the past year. One lived through the winter with no gas at home…. Four receive play therapy to deal with the trauma they’ve survived in their short little lives, and one of these children was admitted to a psychiatric unit last month because he was threatening to kill himself.”

Every day, we say to ourselves, “People just don’t know how bad poverty is in this city.”

My wish, in this season of hope, is that people will step out of their comfort zones and go looking for local children in need.

Connect with them through a school, a homeless shelter, a church, a social service agency. You won’t have to go far. You just have to know where to look.

And you won’t have to do much before you see your time and care making a difference.