Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Two Cape Cods: Hidden Poverty on the Cape and Islands - Part 2

Monomoy Island is Lynne Fletcher O'Brien's favorite spot in the world. As many of the mainland's residents leave, this is where the gray seals come from as far away as Canada to spend the winter. When she's away, O'Brien daydreams about being here with the seals, at home in Chatham.

Lynne Fletcher O'Brien: "Probably my best memories are the band concert on Friday nights, with penny candy and balloons, the Fourth of July parade, going to The Squire in my college years."

Cape Codders would call O'Brien a "wash ashore," a summer resident raised someplace else. It's true that the 41-year old mother lives in Virginia, and grew up in New Jersey, but Chatham is where she baptized her three children. It's where she was married and where she would prefer to die. So it came as a great surprise to her when she learned just recently that there were hungry people in Chatham.

Lynne Fletcher O'Brien: "It was really disturbing. It was incredibly disturbing to me that this goes on. It never occurred to me that something this serious was going on in the off-season."

Beginning last summer, O'Brien and her three children would pile into the family car each Saturday and go pick up food bins at the local real estate offices. On her own, O'Brien recruited realtors to help her gather food from departing vacationers. She named the effort "Pantry Partners." Half of the goods go to the Chatham Food Pantry at St. Christopher's Church. She brings the remainder to The Family Pantry in Harwich.

Once a month, three sisters travel together to the Family Pantry in Harwich. At 89, Marjorie Baker from South Yarmouth is the oldest. Twins Caroline Sears and Constance Malio are five years younger. The sisters have never lived outside of Cape Cod. Constance's sisters agree that this is not how the sisters expected to spend their retirement years.

When Marjorie, Caroline, and Constance visited the Family Pantry last Spring, there was a shortage of bread (only one loaf available per person). But there were plenty canned goods, pasta, and 12-packs of Coke, which was a nice treat.

Constance Malio: "Years ago you were able to get by. But now everything is so high, you just can't make it."

Marjorie Baker: "Yeah, but years ago you had your husband, who you thought would be with you for quite awhile and help support. And when he goes, boom, you've got nothing, really, except what you can get."

Of the forty-two food pantries and feeding programs in Cape Cod's fifteen coastal towns, the Family Pantry is the busiest. Mary Anderson is the pantry's executive director. Her father and the St. Vincent DePaul Society helped open the pantry sixteen years ago. And at the time, Mary says she didn't understand why.

Mary Anderson: "My brother and I are teasing him: 'Who are you going to feed on the Cape, dad?' We had been down here as vacationers, and as vacationers you are at the beach and having cookouts on the backyard. Poverty was not evident. He just kept telling us there is poverty out there. Having watched the pantry grow from a little tiny storefront to now this large warehouse, I've learned over the sixteen years that there certainly is poverty on the Cape. I think it is a quieter poverty."

As the director of human needs at the Lower Cape Outreach Council, Robin Carroll helps operate a food pantry in nearby Orleans. She says there's no denying that many year-round Cape families are struggling to get by, and some are going hungry. One of the most common things that stops people from getting help, she says, is shame.

Robin Carroll: "We have families that come and use our food pantry that ask, do you have some Stop and Shop bags. So when they bring it home to their families, they don't realize it is coming from a food pantry."

Free food can be particularly important for families at the end of the month, Anderson says, when bills are due. She tells the story of a stormy day late last year, when she watched out the window as a rainstorm raged and a young mother struggled to get both her baby and her groceries in the car.

Mary Anderson: "One of the volunteers happened to remember that we had a raincoat out in the back that would fit this woman. So she went and got the raincoat and I watched the woman. She put the raincoat over her food, not over herself. And I thought to myself, you know, another mother that age would look at the weather today with an eight-month old baby and say, I'm not going food shopping, I'll go tomorrow. But this woman, this was her day. Our clients can come once every three weeks. Her three weeks were up. It didn't matter about the weather. She was coming for the food, and she used her raincoat to protect the food."

This past January, the Family Pantry distributed bags of food to more than 700 different families. During a two-hour shift recently, volunteers set a record by giving bags of food to sixty-two families. Just like every week, they came from Dennis, Hyannis, Yarmouth, Harwich, Brewster and Chatham.