Hungry in Colorado
by Tessa Cheek
photographs by Robin Dickinson, Sallie Campbell,
Caroline Pooler & Andrea Fuller
Robin Dickinson: Physician, heal thyself
The sun is setting across the Denver skyline as Dr. Robin Dickinson points to her house. She's looking out the window from her office on the eighth floor of a Wells Fargo building.
“I lived in the same house from age 6 until the night before I married my husband,” she says. Her gaze lingers on the specific rooftop that only she can be sure of, one of a series of small bungalows lining a street with turning trees and fenced yards that make up middle-class Englewood.
Dickinson is a family physician with a private practice that serves patients without a lot of money and/or minimal or no health insurance. She never expected to find herself one of them -- a victim to medical misfortune who lost her health insurance and is now enrolled in SNAP.
“I was working in my first practice. I had two kids, a mortgage, a husband, a dog — everything just the way we’re supposed to do it in our county. Then BOOM! Just like that, a one-in-100,000 chance, this thing you can’t predict.”
Around this time last year, an artery tore in Robin’s neck and she suffered two strokes at the back of her brain. Fortunately, her cognition was not impacted, but the likely permanent outcome of the two cerebellar strokes is that, more than a year later, she can no longer feel her body in space.
She shows me. She closes her eyes and holds out her left hand in a thumbs-up position. She asks someone to move her hands around in the air. Then she reaches with her right hand for her left. She reaches and reaches, tests the air, moves systematically across and down the space in front of her and finally finds her own thumb. She opens her eyes, “See?”
“It’s called proprioception,” she says of the lost feeling, her inability to find one hand with the other.
No longer able to drive safely and rendered dizzy by the buzz of a busy medical facility, Dickinson resigned from her full-time practice to work part time at her private clinic. She re-taught herself to ride a bike for the commute to work, where she sees a few clients each day. After months of healing, she’s steadily increasing her hours, but Robin’s is still on a long road back to full health and professional and financial security.
For a few months after the strokes, money became extremely tight for Dickinson and her family. She was effectively unemployed and her husband worked full time to care for her and the kids. At $800 a month, more than all their other bills combined excluding their mortgage, health insurance was one of the first services the family felt forced to cut to save money, even though Robin was still recovering. For a time, the family survived on potatoes, brown rice, and oatmeal, served in rotation.
“It took me about six weeks to think, Wait a second, we actually qualify for assistance. This isn’t just for other people, it’s for anybody, and right now, after this major catastrophic thing has happened, it’s our social safety net.”
Dickinson eventually landed health insurance through Medicaid and enrolled her family in SNAP.
“The happiest moments of my life were marrying my husband, having my kids, and that day we went out with our first SNAP benefit,” she says. “We went to the grocery store, my son asked for a watermelon, and I was able to say Yes! My daughter hugged a cucumber.”
This summer, she and her family planted lettuce, tomatoes, corn and kale with seeds they bought with SNAP benefits. Yet even with assistance, the money doesn't go very far. They make what Robin calls “stone soup,” a weeklong stew with a few dollars' worth of meat and tons of veggies.
“For us, SNAP has always been something to celebrate,” she adds. “Until you’re in that situation, it’s impossible to understand the desperation or the insane, incredible relief when you realize there’s something there for you, that we live in a sane and civilized place where people care if my children have enough food to eat.”
Sallie Campbell: On the seventh day
The day of the month you get your SNAP benefits corresponds to the last digit of your social security number.
“The seventh is my day,” says Sallie Campbell, a Denver native and mother of four grown children with five grandkids.
“It’s been absolutely awful now that I’m on my own,” she says. “I stretch $80 a month… I spend a lot of my own cash just to have enough.”
Campbell has been on SNAP for seven years, ever since she was diagnosed with HIV. She has spent time on the program in Florida and Texas, but she says Colorado is by far the toughest when it comes to getting by on SNAP benefits.
“I get the meat at Safeway marked 30 percent off. Old meat. I try to find a chicken that's on sale or break up family packages.”
Nutrition is a life-and-death concern for Sallie when it comes to managing her illness. Having access to healthy food completely changed her body, which six years ago had whithered to skin and bone.
“I’m learning to eat well out of necessity,” she says. “I have learned to eat raw vegetables, and I love bell peppers. To get the bell peppers on sale is a great thing.”
For Campbell, food is no different from medicine. But she has retired and relies on SNAP and Social Security. So, given the nature of her illness and her resources, she often is forced to choose one over the other.
“There has to be a balance in there, where it's not a matter of eating versus taking your medication, because it can still be like that,” she says. “It shouldn't be so difficult.”
Camnpbell knows the SNAP program well and has watched it change over the years. She recalls the shame of counting out stamps as a child, the intense feeling of being watched and considered a food-stamp kid. SNAP has gone to digital cards, making a trip to the store less difficult, but the stigma of the program remains. Sallie worries that the stigma and the bureaucratic hurdles in entering the program discourage some who most need benefits.
“People have to do community service,” she says of the little-talked-about enrollment requirements for SNAP. “No matter what, you got to jump through some hoops. There was a time when the paperwork was 24-pages long and now it's down to eight... but even eight pages is too much for some people. Maybe they don't know how to read or they don't know how to write. They don't understand some of the questions presented to them so they don't even apply.”
One place in Denver Campbell feels free of that stigma is SAME Cafe, a pay-what-you-can healthy food joint on east Colfax.
"They have good salads and the best-crusted pizza," she says. "No one is looked down on. Everyone sits at the same kind of table. I enjoy myself here."
It's three days before Thanksgiving but nearly two weeks until Campbell's next month of SNAP benefits comes through. Even so, she says she has a lot to be grateful for; she mentions a new-found political commitment to reducing hunger in Colorado and sunny, bustling SAME cafe, where we're talking .
"I don't know if she comes from this kind of background," Campbell says of Libby Birky, the café owner. "Maybe God just blessed her with a giving heart."
It was hard for Andrea Fuller to agree to do this interview. She remembers lying in bed at night, five years old and sometimes hungry, promising herself that she would graduate college before getting married, which she did. Promising herself that she would always provide good and healthy food for her kids, which she does.
She knew what some people would say.
“You know, I have acquaintances and friends who make comments about people on food stamps, not even knowing I'm on SNAP.”
It’s true that, sitting across from Fuller in the swank industrial lobby of Denver Open Media, you would never guess she is on the program. She looks like who she is: a typical Colorado mom. She looks trim in a sporty black zip-up. Her blond hair is shoulder length, stylish but unfussy.
“I'm a well-educated woman. I have a master's degree. I know how to carry myself and interact with people professionally. I've been around the world,” she says.
“To come to the point where I have to get on a government program ... It's one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do.”
Before enrolling in SNAP, Fuller budgeted $50 a week in groceries for herself and her two young children. Fresh produce, meat and cheese were all but off the table. It was a brutal few months, brought on by a series of difficult circumstances. She was out of work and out of an abusive relationship.
“I started my own business and pieced together a variety of jobs," she says deliberately. "Most recently, I had five different projects, but it still didn’t add up to full-time work, not in terms of time, not in terms of income.”
After a year and a half without regular employment and a year on SNAP, Fuller joined the Denver Voice in November as the organization’s executive director. It's a full-time job with benefits. Her time on SNAP is coming to a close.
“Without SNAP, it would have been difficult to feed my children and myself,” she says. “I’m grateful. It’s humbling, but I’m grateful at the same time.”
Fuller says she agreed to do this interview because she wants to shatter stereotypes about who is on SNAP and what the program can provide. For her, it was a safety net that allowed her to protect her children from hunger, but not only hunger.
“My children don't know. I've really shielded them from a lot. I don’t want them to see themselves as poor. Oh, mom's on food stamps. That’s not how they need to frame themselves. They need as regular a life as possible, and being their mother is my first priority: nurturing them, helping them become who they are.”
Andrea Fuller: Out of the SNAP closet
In 1978 Caroline Pooler got off a bus from Kansas City, Missouri, where she grew up in a big Irish Catholic family. She has called Denver home ever since.
“This city has always been a transient place,” she says. “Whenever I come back to Denver, I want to kiss the ground.”
Pooler produces and sells work as an artist at RedLine studios. She also teaches art to at-risk kids. She urban farms and sells produce. She has written a children’s book, a book of poems. She worked for years in medical data entry, but lost her job in 2011, she says, when she reported her boss for breaching patient privacy.
As an artist, Pooler is looking for points of connection. She wants to see behind the state of being hungry and being full, to present the enormous and powerful structure in place. She wants to name it in the small ways that count.
She tells of growing and selling tomatoes in her food desert neighborhood, Schafer Park.
She tells of her Cambodian neighbors, who cook their lost loved ones' favorite dishes, set out beautiful bowls of rice and bright plates of vegetables, all food for the dead. Though she has battled hunger, she is not critical of these ancestral meals.
"They're reaching deeply into the roots of their culture and preserving them," she says.
When Pooler first got on SNAP during the fall of 2012, she started her own little food ministry that she called “One Bowl, One Soul.”
“It was just to let people know I loved them enough to serve them a meal I had just made,” she says.
At first she sought out people who had been turned away from food banks and kitchens, often for being too intoxicated. Eventually, she shifted focus to youth art workshops, though she still continues to share meals with her neighbors.
Today, in the art classes she teaches for at-risk teens, Pooler plans to reward hard work and steady attendance with King Soopers gift cards. She knows they might use the cards to buy cigarettes or soda, but she argues that the most important thing is the lesson — commit to something, work hard, show up, and you’ll have more of your own choices in life. One of the principles of SNAP is to preserve the capacity for choice, even and perhaps especially in a time of crisis.
“Getting on SNAP, as far as my social cast goes, it made me feel a little up, which might sound foolish, but it was huge for me to finally be able to reliably get food and water,” she says. “Before a lot of my day was spent making sure I was in the right place at the right time to get fed, which left a lot of things undone.”
SNAP has increased Pooler's options, but she's still powerfully aware of the boundaries she must push up against.
“I live a mile and a half from Walmart and King Soopers, three miles from Safeway,” she says. “That’s not walking distance.”
“I keep thinking to myself, You really have to get out of here. You really have to elevate yourself out of this poverty without using or abusing someone… They say attitude is everything.”
She's considering taking the advice of a hoodoo radio personality who recommends carrying around a little dirt from a Walmart property for good luck.
“They’re so rich," she says with a wry smile, referring to Walmart. “Even their dirt has power.”