Newport
On Sunday afternoon between 12:30 and 1, a little more than a quarter of that many donated money and/or food and signed up to walk five miles as a way to raise awareness of hunger as well as money to combat it.
While scores of people were thronging around a youth football game less than a mile up Route 10 at Newport Middle High School, longtime CROP-walk organizer Tracey Bailey (also a Newport athletics booster) was counting her blessings for those who did register. A couple of dozen looked pretty good next to the 10 or so who braved a cold downpour a couple of years ago.
“It’s tapered down, but we’re not giving up,” Bailey, a member of South Congregational Church, said before sending the walkers away on what she believes is Newport’s 30th CROP Walk. “We have walked in the snow. We have walked with gloves, and if somebody didn’t have a pair, those who did would share one of the gloves and put the other hand in their pocket.”
Before joining Sunday’s walk, South Congregational Church pastor Eliot Kay kneeled and asked the two-dozen registered trekkers to join him in prayer on the steps of the bandstand .
“Be mindful of those who have less,” Kay intoned, with his black standard poodle Salem straining at a leash. “We ask that this walk bear fruit.”
Nationwide, 107,000 walkers raised a combined $9 million in 2017, according to crophungerwalk.org. In addition to Newport’s on Sunday, volunteers in Lyme and New London also led walks.
“I at the moment I have counted over $1,500 for this year,” Bailey reported as of 7 p.m. on Sunday. “I think last year was about $1,600,” with a similar number of walkers. That total included $50 that runners in a trail race on Saturday deposited in a donation jar.
From Newport’s final total, 75 percent will go to national and international hunger programs — CROP stands for Christian Rural Overseas Program, which was founded in 1947 — and 25 percent goes to the food pantry that the Newport Area Association of Churches runs on South Main Street in Newport.
In addition to providing food for walk-ins from 10 area towns, the association serves a monthly Sunshine Diner meal for all comers.
On the last Friday in September, with volunteer cooks and servers, Newport’s Episcopal Church of the Epiphany welcomed 66 guests, according to James Dunford, an aspiring priest who works in the church’s outreach program.
“While some of them are community members who come for the fellowship, we do see a lot of need,” said Dunford, a first-time CROP walker who raised $281 in online pledges. “We hold the dinner at the end of the month because that’s when the money runs out for a lot of people.”
Dianne Roe Rochford, a retired teacher who helped found the diner, said she doesn’t recall seeing as many hungry residents while growing up in Newport as the area is experiencing now. She said that is a consequence, to some degree, of the opioid crisis.
“I’m sure there was some poverty and need back then, too, that I wasn’t as aware of,” Rochford said between trips to the green in her van driving walkers who decided they’d had enough at the turnaround point. “But now, we’ve got a whole different ballgame going on out there. It’s really tragic. We’re wasting human beings. Good people.”
To help such people, especially their children, the Newport-area church group provides food that school nurses stuff into backpacks with other necessities for students from at-risk families.
The churches also support South Congregational’s Got Lunch program, which in its first year is serving 67 kids who might otherwise go without.
“Even here, people are hungry,” Bailey said. “People come in and they say, ‘You have no idea how much this helps.’ ”
Amanda Page, a student at Newport High, paticipated in her first CROP walk in 2016, and this year began volunteering with Got Lunch.
“I know a few people who are having trouble,” she said. “Even though you can get this kind of help anonymously, it’s still hard for a lot of people to ask.”
In addition to the community meals and the pantry, longtime CROP-walk volunteer and South Congregational member Kerry Rochford Hague sees the need in her work in the Claremont-based Turning Points Network, which helps families with a history of domestic violence.
“Food instability is one more thing for the families who are struggling,” Hague said.
She added that the overseas beneficiaries of CROP donations, especially in the Third World, have struggles that are unimaginable here. In many places, CROP can start a community garden with as little as $50; and a family of five can be fed for a month for $110. With $3,000, CROP can install three water pumps and train residents to maintain them.
“At church today,” Hague said, “Tracey and I were talking about people who have to walk miles and miles just for water. That usually falls to girls and women, so they have no time or opportunity to get an education to improve their families’ lives. Here we are on a Sunday afternoon, this is a foliage walk for us. They do this, carrying all that water, every day.
“That kind of puts things in perspective.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.