Stigma about Food Aid
—Alamance County, NC, politician—
Like I say, some people just would do anything not to do it [accept government assistance] because it just feels like they’re less than what they should be is pretty much it. Of course, my grandmother, I remember when they used to give the cheese away. They had a cheese giveaway at one time. I don’t know. You’re probably way too young to remember that, but they would serve lots of cheese and she would go get her cheese, but she wouldn’t have accepted any public assistance. She raised four children all by herself and worked sewing stockings. She knew what hard times were, but she would not have gone to get assistance. That was her big step out to go get some free cheese, big old blocks of cheese.
Providing Hope, Aid, and Direction
My cousin actually, through his ministry, helps some of them [people in Section 8 Housing] occasionally when they have a light bill they can’t pay. We’ve taken the kids out and we bought them some clothes. We actually kind of adopted a family that ended up in Greenville because their mom was in jail. They had to go with their dad and his five children, they were just displaced from one home to the other, so we kept up with them. We actually bought their dad a computer because he was at East Carolina trying to get a degree and work and trying to do the right things. We stopped to see them and they’re just doing tremendous, but they’ve got some direction in their life where before they didn’t.
Eddie Boswell is a County Commissioner for Alamance County. He is Caucasian, in his fifties, and was interviewed by Elon Student Greg Honan on October 30, 2012