By Beverly Beckham, Boston Herald columnist
The call to My Brother’s Keeper came a few days before.
“What do you need?” Terry Orcutt had asked. That’s what she always says. There are no histories taken. No judgments made. Ask and you shall receive. It’s that simple.
The woman needed everything, but she asked only for beds for her three children.
“Do you have a table? Chairs? A couch? A chest of drawers?” Terry questioned.
“No,” the woman said.
They brought food first, and some pots and pans and silverware and dishes, because the woman had only two plates, two knives and two forks. That’s the way it is for millions of Americans. The United Nations reported Wednesday that 16.5% of Americans live in poverty, despite the fact that we are one of the wealthiest nations on earth. A mother and three children sleep on the floor and take turns sitting.
One of every six Americans lives like this.
The woman this day greeted the men delivering the furniture and asked only one question: “Did you bring me a cross?”
The cross is My Brother’s Keeper’s reason for being. It’s what everyone gets after the furniture has been brought in and set up. “Thank you,” the people say. Thank Him,” they’re told. “We’re just the delivery people.”
“In all the stories in the New Testament, Jesus never said to the people he healed, “What is it you do?” He asked, “What is it you need?” It’s need that is the sole prerequisite of My Brother’s Keeper.
“This is easy, what we do,” insists Jim Orcutt, Terry’s husband. “We carry furniture. We make deliveries. What the people we serve do is hard. Their lives are hard. We learn about faith through them.”
He told about Maria, nine months pregnant, with two kids, 4 and 3. She phoned for help, but when called back her phone had been disconnected. “So we just loaded up the truck and headed for her house.”
Her house: A second-floor flat. Plastic children’s table and a single bed they were all sharing.
My Brother’s Keeper delivered beds, sheets, chests of drawers, a table, chairs, food, plates, a refrigerator. But when they plugged in the refrigerator it didn’t work.
“I don’t have any electricity . . . It was shut off because I couldn’t pay the bill,” Maria said.
“How do you cook for your children?” Jim asked.
She explained that the people upstairs loaned her a microwave and ran an extension cord down the stairs in the afternoon. “But they take it back up before dark because they’re afraid someone will steal it.”
My Brother’s Keeper paid half the bill and the electricity was turned back on.
Just the night before My Brother’s Keeper arrived at her door, Maria and her kids shared an apple for dinner. “I cut up an apple and we went out on the porch to watch the stars.” Maria said they sang Alleluia to thank God for the apple. “When your guys started bringing that furniture in, I just knew that the Lord had heard us singing.” Maria said.
While politicians babble about all they have done and all they plan to do, if they are elected, people who aren’t in the headlines go about their days quietly making a big difference in the lives of the poor.
Back at the office, Terry answers the phone. A woman named Judith is crying. She has five children and no food. “We’ll be there this afternoon between two and four,” Terry says.