Janet Lee retired with the goal of keeping busy and keeping up with her Bingo. After two or so years of volunteering with the Waldoboro Food Pantry, Janet is its Operations Manager. A piece of cake,” she says, because she came from that line of work, heading up the food service and materials procurement at Lincoln Health for 35 years. An invitation to ‘observe’ at the Food Pantry led her there. But after only 15 minutes Janet was working there, distributing bread. Two weeks later, she was the Bread Lady. Several months later, Janet was organizing the shelves, setting up rotations of foods and instituting ways to streamline the workflow. Today, only the Bath and Brunswick food pantries serve more people. Janet attributes this both to her team of 20 plus volunteers who never call in sick and the growing need in Waldoboro, Bremen and Nobleboro. Janet says her retirement goal is to do as much as she can possibly do with what she has. But a sentence later, she describes her dream to expand the pantry to include walk-in freezers and refrigeration and a kitchen where volunteers could prepare soups and casseroles. Janet grew up in here, seeing her three children through Medomak Valley High and her eight grandchildren, too. She was a workaholic in those years, with raising her family and putting in seven days a week in her job, so she missed getting involved with the town. But now, with her work at the Food Pantry and with the Waldoboro Ladies Auxiliary, she feels she is a true member of Waldoboro.
The Food Pantry is meeting the need right now in Waldoboro. But come Monday morning, after these shelves are emptied, I’ll be re-ordering to try to keep everything as full as possible. Because it’s getting harder and harder to get food.
Good Shepherd in Auburn is where we get the bulk of what we give. Lately, though, they can’t get stuff. They don’t have the frozen eggs anymore. They don’t have butter anymore. They used to have cheese, but they don’t have that either now. When I ordered yesterday, they had only a small variety of meat. Thank goodness that the last time I ordered bags of chicken legs and breasts, I bought a few extra. At least I’ll have something to work with this week.
Sometimes things fall short, and that’s when I’ll start calling around, keeping an eye out for who might have extras. If I get a phone call from the food pantry in New Harbor, I’ll say, “Bring it! I’ll take it!” I’m a person who always says yes to everything and no to nothing.
You never know when you’re not going to have food. People are going through hard times. So, I’m nervous about winter with the way things are going and with prices going up, too. Eggs went up from $2.59 to $3.89. So, where I used to give our larger families two dozen, I only give a dozen now.
Every other Monday I make my orders. I have a budget. I’ll look for meat first. Then I’ll see whatever else is available. I’m looking for healthy foods. Vegetables. Cereals. Grains and pasta. I’ll load up, too, with the free food the government gives, like dried milk and potatoes. Then I’ll put a call into Bowden for eggs. And I’ll send my order over to Hannaford’s for milk, fruit and other stuff. I don’t want to run out of food.
Everyone gets two bags of non-perishables. But the larger families get more. One bag has the cans and the other has the larger items like rice and beans – which could be lentils or split peas or garbanzo beans or maybe baked beans. There might be baking things, too, like for biscuits or pancakes.
On delivery day, the bags get loaded up on little carts with a flag saying how large the family is, and as it goes through the line of volunteers, someone will pull out meat from the freezer and add that. Someone else will put a bag of vegetables on it, usually onions, carrots, lettuce and whatever is in season from the Hannaford’s and the local farms. Then someone else will add a bag of fruit which always has bananas, apples and oranges. Maybe nectarines or plums. Then they get bread which Borealis gives to us. After that, the cart goes outside for the milk from Hannaford’s and the potatoes from Green Meadows Farm that we store in the garage’s cooler. Finally, someone wheels it to the driveway and puts it into a participant’s car.
If we run short, we give them other things. If it’s eggs, I’ve got frozen eggs in the freezer. If it’s milk, we have dried milk. We might run out of meat, but everyone is still going to get something. Maybe more canned tuna and chicken. Cereals. They’re still going to get those two cans of fruit and the two cans of vegetables. No one leaves without full bags.
When I started, we served between 60 and 80 families. And they were mostly smaller families. Now we serve up to 120 or sometimes 150. We’re starting to see large families, too. When you think about it, a family of six is really one with four children. You start to think, “What do those children need?” But in the end, you go with what you can afford.
I’m just so thankful that we’re able to do what we can do. And it’s not just me. This food pantry wouldn’t exist without our volunteers. The whole program is volunteers. And they’re just like me – they can’t give enough. But I have a saying I tell everyone: “We get what we can get, we give what we can give, and it is what it is.”
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