You don’t have to cross the border to the third world to find children starving. This is something that Charolette Tidwell learned more than 15 years ago. The former nurse saw signs of hunger and starvation in her own hometown.
“I saw the elderly purchasing cat food because they couldn’t afford a tin of tuna,” she recalls. “I saw children starving over the weekends because they couldn’t get their free school lunches on the weekends.”
Tidwell had always given what she could to help these impoverished individuals and families from the Fort Smith area in Arkansas. It seemed a shame that there should be people starving in a country that was considered low on the food security rankings.
Going beyond
When she retired 15 years ago, Tidwell decided to do more. She used up all her pension to start a food pantry in her neighborhood. She now feeds more than 7,000 people every month.
Robyn Smith, a single mother of nine living in Fort Smith knows what it’s like to go hungry. At 41, she has nothing but praise for Tidwell’s initiative. “She’s like an angel,” Smith says. “She gives all that she has and doesn’t expect anything in return.”
Smith depends on the generous food baskets provided by Tidwell to feed her family through the month. “I don’t know what I would do without her,” she says. “She’s just so generous. She’s the most caring person I’ve ever come across.”
Raised in poverty too
Tidwell is no stranger to the struggles of poverty in the US. She too was raised in poverty. Although she was part of a large family, she is the sixth of 10 children, they never knew hunger. This is because her family turned to their one-acre vegetable and fruit garden for sustenance.
“Our family raised chicken in the yard,” she says. “We also had Bo-Bo the cow. We didn’t have that much but we knew how to share what we had. My mother would take soup to families when someone was sick and I would help her.”
She continued this tradition set by her mother years ago after graduating from nursing school. She continued to deliver hot meals to the elderly in her neighborhood.
At 84, Mary Ann Simpson is one of recipient of the former nurse’s kindness. “Back in the 1960s, she would deliver meals on Saturday on her own to anyone in the neighborhood that needed them.”
Tidwell now works with many unpaid volunteers to purchase and supply food to the hungry in her community. She uses half of her monthly pension to support the program along with donations from well-wishers.
