THE COMING STORM

By ANDREW MCGINN

a.mcginn@beeherald.com

On a recent Wednesday morning at the Greene County Christian Action Resource Center food pantry, one client was clearly testing his luck when he stepped out on a limb and asked the volunteer staff if, by chance, they had any toilet paper.

Like the miracle workers they are, staff reappeared with two rolls.

“It’s under lock and key,” joked Gary Haupert, who, together with wife Shirley, were recipients of the Jefferson Area Chamber’s ABC (Above and Beyond the Call) Award in February for their work in relocating the ARC to a bigger space.

“The county assessor wanted to know if we had any toilet paper,” Gary continued, now getting on a roll all his own, “because it doubled our assessed value.”

In truth, there’s no putting a price on what the ARC can offer as COVID-19 upends the lives we knew just two months ago, when toilet paper was plentiful and the Hauperts were being recognized for a job well done.

As people increasingly find themselves out of work and out of options, Shirley and Gary Haupert stand ready to once again go above and beyond the call.

“I expect it’s going to be something we’ve never seen in our lifetime,” predicted Shirley, who has become the ARC’s director in the five years since her retirement as a high school home ec teacher in Guthrie Center.

“We want to be prepared,” she added, having just returned with Gary on this day from the Food Bank of Iowa in Des Moines with an extra half-ton of food for the pantry. “It hasn’t hit Greene County yet, but it will.”

At pandemic’s end, you may never have known anyone who got sick from the novel coronavirus, but you’ll probably know someone unemployed because of it.

In just the first four weeks of the public health crisis, the U.S. lost about 22 million jobs, or roughly 13 percent of the nation’s entire workforce, the Associated Press reported last week.

The International Monetary Fund has branded the crisis the Great Lockdown, calling it the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And no country in the world has been spared, the IMF noted.

For the sake of comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in the depths of the Great Depression hit 25.59 percent in May of 1933, leaving with it an indelible mark on an entire generation.

“God provides,” Shirley said, “and if God is in this, which I believe he is, he’ll give us whatever we need to help the people.”

But as anybody who has ever helped hold onto the social safety net knows, the economy before COVID-19 was akin to a sick guy who insists he’s healthy.

Five years ago, when the Hauperts retired from their teaching jobs and threw themselves into their work at the ARC, the pantry distributed about 3,000 pounds of food every month.

Today, it’s closer to 7,000 pounds.

“It’s doubled,” said Gary, a former Panorama science teacher.

Statistics from the Food Bank of Iowa — whose president and CEO, Michelle Book, is a 1979 graduate of Jefferson High School — are equally at odds with stock portfolios in recent years. During the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, the Food Bank of Iowa distributed about five million pounds of food to its partners in 55 counties.

These days, the food bank is distributing close to 14 million pounds.

And that was before COVID-19.

Before 2015, the Hauperts admittedly weren’t aware of the need that existed right at home.

For two decades, they’ve led mission trips from the First United Methodist Church to American Indian reservations in South Dakota and Montana.

“You absolutely see poor people,” Gary said of the reservations. “To have it in your own backyard kind of opens your eyes. It’s kind of the silent minority.”

Sometimes, he observed, that silent minority chooses anonymity, and the ARC food pantry’s new location near the overpass makes coming and going even more inconspicuous. That, in turn, could be influencing the increase in use, he said.

Prior to reopening last May in the former Clark Plumbing and Heating building, the ARC was located a mere block south of the well-traveled downtown square.

As Gary puts it, there’s no longer a parade of cars driving by.

The move also enabled the ARC to be more user-friendly, with clients — all of whom are first screened by New Opportunities — getting to pick out their own groceries each month rather than being handed a sack of food due to lack of space.

COVID-19 has temporarily forced the ARC to return to its old ways in the new space. Preselected food items and personal care products are distributed on Wednesdays to clients who never have to leave their cars.

“They’re so grateful. They’re so polite,” Shirley said.

There are new items to distribute as well, like handmade masks for those wanting one, sewn by a contingent of ladies at the Methodist church in Jefferson.

Clients are being asked to return whatever canned goods in their sack they don’t like or can’t use, or to pass it onto a neighbor.

Canned goods have indeed returned.

“That is really showing generosity to other people,” Gary said.

Generous people have also been stepping up with donations of money to the ARC in the first month since the Great Lockdown began, including the Jefferson Telephone Company Charitable Trust, whose gift of $10,000 to the ARC on April 13 Shirley called “unbelievable.”

“There’s a lot of good people out there,” Gary said.

That gives them faith that, no matter how bad it gets, the ARC will be able to weather the storm.

“If it gets busy,” Gary said, “we’ll get it done.”