Sometimes they get to me. Answering my phone at work today reveals a familiar voice. Raina calls me every other month to see if we can help her again or if I happen to know of any new places she can apply for help paying her natural gas bill.

Let me give you some background: In Iowa (and perhaps in many states, although not Illinois), the state Utility Board mandates that all electric and natural gas companies must respect the Winter Moritorium period of November 1 - April 1. During this time the companies are not allowed to shut off utility service for non-payment for any household approved for the Federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). As the title suggests, this is a federally subsidized payment to heating companies for low-income families, which I facilitate for my county. It's a one-time payment for the year, usually in the neighborhood of $200 dollars/family. Our agency and the utility companies stress to these approved families that if they don't pay a dime all winter, it will catch up to them in April and their service will likely be cut off as soon after April 1st as the company can get a person out there. Still, we have a couple families that always seem surprized to open their mail on some chilly late-March day and see a big, red, 12-day notice of pending disconnection.

Don't get me wrong. Out of the 909 families I approved for the assistance program last winter, only a handfull, for one reason or another, bring in the big huge $1,000+ gas and electric bill and expect me to work some magic and plead to the utility for their pardon. Outside of the winter moritorium I do get about $1,000 a month of emergency money to help prevent disconnection of gas/electric service or to help reconnect service. Raina is one of these people that calls me up this past April, and our agency, along with 3 other local organizations, whittled her bill down so she could go back to making budgetted payments of $200/month. She calls me today, now the middle of August to see if she's eligible for that help again. Technically, I'm allowed to help a family with up to $500.00 of emergency money each year (the cap is $200 per crisis). There are so many families in need of these funds throughout the year that I really don't like to approve the same family for help more than once a year because that's basically taking that money from a new family who's bound to come in tomorrow: a woman who's partner took off and left her with all the bills, a man who just got laid off from his unskilled job of 22 years, a college student who's trying to make it on their own, but is learning from their mistakes. I just can't reason spending another $200 on the same family, who never seems to achieve anything resembling self-sufficiency, where every month is a crisis, no matter how many times I help them out, year after year. And for this I feel bad. I don't know that my judgement would make sense to Raina, when her baby's on a nebulizer, and her husband's still laid off, and there's a problem with her welfare check... So I lie. Sort of. I tell her we can't help now (but I don't offer when she would be elligible again.) I guess it's not really a lie since I kind of make the rules. But, I've made exceptions for other people. A particular former staff member has been helped three times this year, though I was upset about that (I was out of the office and our director made that decision; if it was up to me, I wouldn't have done it).

Am I a scrooge? I am a bit of a tightwad with my emergency money. It breaks my heart to have to turn away an old farm widow who's traveled 20 miles in the middle of July for help on her $50 electric bill because I spent my last $200 for the month on a repeat family. I'm realizing that my reasoning probably makes perfect sense to you. Those welfare queens and all their sick children. Why don't they get a job, quit smoking, and stop making babies?

The thought wanders into my head some days too... but then I see Jennifer and her two little boys. She works down at the Taco John's. She makes too much now to qualify for welfare payments, no food stamps, no child care assistance, no LIHEAP anymore. But you can tell it's hard... She comes in for food every now and again (no income requirements here for a food pantry) when shifts are low. Maybe she could go back to school and get a better job. But then, who would make your tacos?

Last night I helped a man in a wheelchair across the street and it made me angry at you. I was in my Cutlass enroute to a meeting that I was already late for and approached one of the ba-zillion stop signs in the little downtown area of Ames. All of a sudden I realized I needed to give the chunky soles of my sandals a little bit more pressure on the brake than my toes appreciated in order to avoid cutting off the brick-path crosswalk where a man was trying to cross. I hate those drivers who stop beyond the Big White Line at stop signs for that very reason: you're likely to either hit a pedestrian or bike-rider or uppity Schnauzer-on-too-long-of-a-leash OR at the very least cut off their path and cause me to muttter "Dickhead" under my breath at you in hopes that it will make you less rude in the future.

So, last night I was one of those drivers and stopped just a tad over the red bricks laid to denote the crosswalk and there's Nick in his wheelchair to my left, stuck in the road between the hump of the middle of the street and the ramp from the sidewalk. He waves me on to pass him and complete my turn. "Don't wait for me to cross; you'll be late for your meeting and for work tomorrow too if you wait on me," he seems to be saying. And I do complete my turn, looking around frantically for a pedestrian that could lend him a hand and allow me to continue on, guilt-free, and be only a few minutes late to my meeting. There's a middle-aged couple crossing the street perpendicular to Nick. I figure they'll take care of him, but by the time I'm halfway down the block and look in my rear-view mirror, they're opening the door to the jewelry store and Nick's still stuck between the hump and the ramp, waving on other vehicles.

I park in the first spot I see and leave the car running. As I trot down the block in the direction from which I had just driven, a young man passes in front of Nick and continues on, entering the Jimmy Johns on the corner, not even seeming to take note of the battle going on between metal and cement and biceps only a few feet away. By this time I'm pretty furious but I don't let it enter my voice: "Hey there! Looks like you're a little stuck... Can I give you a hand across the street?" I'm not sure what kind of brain is in the body in the chair, so I'm cautious, but Nick nods his head. It becomes apparent that he's at least a little developmentally challanged and I try to wheel him swiftly, but not so fast that he's freaked out. Safe on the opposite corner, I ask Nick, "Which way are you going now? I can help you over the other hump." His arm makes a big gesture and his index finger points crookedly, but mostly to the left. "Here we go!" When we get the other side of Main Street, now kitty-corner to where Nick
started, he lets out a delighted squeal and reaches around the chair to shake my right hand. "My name's Nick," his lips struggle to get out. "Hi, Nick," I hold onto his overly-firm grip, "My name's Melissa. Nice to meet you. Where are you on your way to?" He says something that I don't understand and I ask him to repeat it, twice, in fact. But I never do catch what he's saying. "Oh, I'm new in town," I hear myself saying, even though I've now been here a year and a half, "you're good to get there on your own?" He nods his head wildly, "see you later!" I think he tells me as I jog back to my car.

I'm angry at you because you might think I'm a super nice person to stop what I'm doing, be extra late for where I'm going and dash to help a man in a wheelchair over the hump in the street. I'm not a super nice person. I'm just a normal, reasonable human being and you should be too, you jewelry-buying, sandwich-eating, lazy shmoes. Normal, reasonable human beings stop and take a moment or two to help other human beings by doing something really easy (get a man in a wheelchair 50 feet) when it's really hard and a little humiliating for that other person to struggle in public to acomplish (get your not-so-strong-developmentally-and-movement-challanged body 50 feet). Nick might not understand humiliation, or he may be used to the whole process by now. But, he sure seemed extraordinarily happy to get a little push.

I curse the little highs I get from helping other people, multiple times a day at work and also little events like this, because it shouldn't be novel when you do what you can to minimize suffering of any kind. It shouldn't be something worthy of note at the dinner table or in a blog. It should just be life...doing all you can to look around you for opportunities to spread love, build trust, and encourage harmony. If that's too hippie, touchy-feely for you, try opportunities to be a normal, reasonable human being. Otherwise, you might as well be on Neptune.

Today I learned that Jeremiah makes more money than me. He asks me if I can move my not-yet-sorted-because-my-volunteer-didn't-show-up-today canned goods off of the food pantry floor and into the hallway so he can mop tonight after we've all gone home to our family dinner time. He grew up in a small town whose name I can't remember now, but begins with an 'L', near a bigger town whose name begins with an 'A' in North-Central Iowa. There were 21 kids in his graduating high-school
class, he tells me. He wasn't real smart, he says, so he's glad he didn't grow up in a large school system like Ames. But, he's worth more than $8 an hour so he quit his job at the hotel for his current gig with Story County Maintenance. I don't know how I came to know these things about Jeremiah since I only remember asking him how he was as he breezed by my office door, but I start to really wonder why after four years of higher education and a B.S. I'm only making $8.37/hr.

The answer seems simple, I guess. It's because of my chosen field, it's because of budget cuts, it's because it was supposed to be temporary until my partner finished his M.S. But I could be someone else with this job. If I were a single mom with just one child, this wage would put me at 145% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines and I would qualify for the very services
I'm adminstrating. That seems a little twisted... But since I'm an over-educated single woman living in sin with her parter and children are a long thought away, I can't really complain. Stephanie up in Hamilton County can though.

There's something about summer that makes the pressure rise. Whether the electricity in their Section 8 apartment is getting shut off tomorrow, or they just got layed off from their 40K job and want to know how they can apply for rent assistance next month, the calls are twice as many and twice as strained in the heat of August. Even in my over-cooled basement
office, their voices break me into a sweat and my heart races trying to think of where I can turn them to for help. The second to worst answer I can give is "I don't know who can help you." The worst is, "there's no one who can help you." I don't ever really actually give the latter answer, although I often think it while I'm giving the former. My eyes panic as they scan my referral phone number list...is it under 'C' for "Community", or 'S' for "Services"...?