THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 19, 1994 TAG: 9408170108
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Religion
SOURCE: BY JUDY PARKER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 115 lines
A TRAGIC DICHOTOMY exists in the United States between the unknown number of people who live with persistent hunger and its consequences, and the thousands of tons of food left unharvested and rotting in the fields of farms at the end of each growing season.
But a group from two churches in Portsmouth and Chesapeake recently participated in a program designed to provide throwaway food for the hungry and homeless.
Harvest of Hope, a program of the United Methodist Church's Society of St. Andrew, is an ecumenical gleaning/hunger study retreat that helps educate young people and adults about the problem of hunger in America and at the same time provides food to the needy.
``When you become aware of the magnitude of the hunger issue and the numbers of people who go to bed hungry every night, you might despair that the problem is just to big to overcome,'' said Dan Wood, a member of Chesapeake's Aldersgate United Methodist Church. ``But after participating in just one Harvest of Hope, I realized that there really is enough food to feed everybody.''
Harvest of Hope works like this. Volunteers agree to spend one week gleaning leftover vegetables and fruits from independent farms on the Delmarva Peninsula and then distribute that food to food banks, soup kitchens and other agencies working with the hungry and homeless.
All along this three-state area bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay, family farms benefit from a temperate climate and long growing season that provides bountiful harvests of crops including potatoes and peas, corn and cucumbers, beans and tomatoes, watermelons and cantaloupes. While the region produces multiple tons of these foodstuffs, each year thousands of pounds of vegetables and fruits remain unharvested, left to rot in their fields.
It's these leftovers that Harvest of Hope volunteers glean for the hungry, taking their charge from two biblical passages: Deuteronomy 24:21, ``When you harvest your vineyard you must not pick it over a second time. Let anything left be for the stranger, the orphan and the widow,'' and Leviticus 19:9-10, ``When you gather the harvest of your land, you are not to harvest to the very end of the field. You are not to gather the gleanings of the harvest. . . . You must leave them for the poor and the stranger.''
Harvest of Hope began in 1985 as a project of the Society of St. Andrew to combat hunger. Acute hunger causes about 15 million deaths worldwide each year, the organization says.
``I never realized the seriousness of hunger and homelessness until I went on my first Harvest of Hope,'' said Jennifer Holliman, a member of Portsmouth's West End United Methodist Church.
Participating in her fifth Harvest of Hope, the Virginia Wesleyan College junior describes the experience as physically, spiritually and emotionally exhausting.
``It's extremely intense. At my first Harvest, I spent the first three days calling my mom and begging her to come and get me. But when I saw people in the shelters, especially the children, I realized this can make a difference.
``That's why I also made a covenant to do something locally to fight hunger,'' said Holliman, who volunteers at Oasis and two local shelters for battered women.
``It used to depress me to go those places, but these people matter.''
During their one-week stay on the Eastern Shore, Harvest of Hope volunteers are based at Fairlee Manor, a camp belonging to the United Methodist Church near Chestertown, Md.
Participants work the fields for about four hours each morning. Afternoons are spent distributing the food or working in local shelters or agencies such as the Salvation Army. Group meetings at night are used to study the causes and possible solutions for hunger, nutritional awareness, and referring to the Bible for references to hunger that are used during worship services. Although Harvest of Hope is a Methodist program, the 10 participants from Portsmouth and Chesapeake in this summer's experience included Baptists and Catholics as well as the members from West End and Aldersgate United Methodist churches.
While together only a short while, the interdenominational group placed emphasis on building a community of faith to demonstrate the relationship existing between their Christian faith and their personal lifestyles.
During July's Harvest, the Portsmouth and Chesapeake volunteers gleaned more than 4,800 pounds of corn, 2,200 pounds of apples and 7,000 pounds of cucumbers. Since 1985, more than half a million pounds of fresh produce has been gleaned and distributed to the needy via Harvest of Hope.
``Harvesting those cucumbers was a real eye-opener,'' said Wood, of Aldersgate.
``To give an example of how much food goes unharvested, we only worked eight acres of a field belonging to a Mennonite farmer near Dover, Del. That only accounted for about one 90th of his entire farm and cucumber crop.
``He'd already harvested all the cucumbers he was going to harvest for the season. By the time we'd finished, we had run out of containers and the truck from the food bank couldn't hold more. Still, there was so much left in the field that I'm sure we could have gleaned several thousand more pounds of cucumbers.
``I think that proves that the problem of hunger is not insurmountable,'' Wood said. ILLUSTRATION: Photos by JENNIFER HOLLIMAN
Harvest of Hope volunteer Ryan Volz tests a freshly shucked ear of
corn while working in the fields.
Volunteers receive a rope bracelet as a reminder of the hungry.
OTHER PROGRAMS
Two other food harvesting programs of the Society of St. Andrew
are The Potato Project and The Gleaning Network. Like Harvest for
Hope, these two programs provide food for the hungry in Virginia,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware and the District of
Columbia.
The Potato Project annually distributes 15 million pounds of
cosmetically unmarketable potatoes, while The Gleaning Network has
salvaged and distributed more than 2.2 million pounds of produce.
by CNB