Jeanette was sitting in the waiting room at one of the neighbourhood food banks in our network. I didn’t think she would be open to speaking with me. She was by herself that day, and she seemed very quiet and reserved. When I approached her and explained how I was there to speak with food bank visitors to learn more about their stories and how they came to need food support, she agreed to speak with me. I asked her to tell me a little bit about herself when she immediately broke down.
I want to tell you about a food bank visitor who I spoke to recently. Jeanette* and her family were experiencing homelessness when I spoke with her at St Mary’s Cooper’s, one of our 60+ food programs. Jeanette is a mother of six children, including three young children, with one as young as 4-years-old, who live with her and her husband.
Jeanette was the second food bank visitor I interviewed to ever cry in front of me. And nothing makes my role as a story collector more real and more heart-wrenching than seeing a person so clearly struggling. It makes significant problems like homelessness, food insecurity, and poverty more tangible and real. It’s one thing to read about these issues or hear about them in the news, but it’s an entirely different story to speak with someone who is living it.
Jeanette told me how she fell into hard times after her husband lost his job. They got evicted from their home after they fell behind on rent. With nowhere to go, Jeanette and her family ended up living in their car.
At the time, Jeanette was working as a warehouse supervisor. Unfortunately, she lost her job as well.
“We couldn’t find anywhere else to live. I was already missing a lot of work. What am I going to do? Go to work, living in my car with my four kids? I didn’t even have a place to shower, so I had to leave. And then it wasn’t fair to my team. I was letting my team down every day, every time I missed work. So I had to leave.”
They had to keep moving around, trying to find a place to live. Jeanette had been going from city to city looking for the cheapest Airbnb she could find.
“Basically, you have to move every week. So the kids have no stability whatsoever. We can’t even keep them in school. I have to homeschool them because we’re just moving. Sometimes we’re in Barrie, sometimes we’re in Wasaga. I guess sometimes we would be in Windsor, whatever the cheapest place was at the time.”
Before all of this, they were just a family living in a suburban home.
“It’s been almost six months since we’ve been in this loop, that doesn’t seem to end.”
At the time of our interview, Jeanette had been living in a motel in Mississauga with four of her children and her husband for the last month. At the motel, Jeanette says there are so many families there, including families with newborn babies and seniors.
Nearly 30% of food bank visitors are children. That means almost 16,000 kids rely on Food Banks Mississauga for food support.
“It’s sad that people have to live like this right now.”
Jeanette has been trying to find a job, but it has been challenging to find any position.
“You can send your resume out for 100 jobs a day and get one call back, and you never get that second interview or whatever it is. So it’s hard.”
Jeanette and her family have also been facing barriers to securing affordable housing.
“We had no jobs or credit scores. No job to get a place. You need a job in order to sign a lease. And you need a credit score to sign a lease.”
Jeanette says she receives Employment Insurance, but it’s not enough. She says she gets $800 every two weeks from EI.
“I don’t know how they expect you to survive on $800 every two weeks. I mean, the motel a month costs over $3,000. And that’s at $96 a night. So it’s two beds. We don’t even all fit in it, really. We have to sleep sideways on the bed.”
“It’s really hard. It’s really, really hard. And there’s a lot of struggling families out there right now.”
On top of all this, the cost of living has impacted Jeanette and her family. She says she has “definitely” noticed the increase in food costs. Even fast food is out of her budget because it’s so expensive.
“I feel like within the last three months, prices have increased a lot more than they were. And it just keeps going up…You can’t even feed your children anything healthy anymore. Because it’s just too expensive.”
“It’s absolutely insane, the cost of food. Just the basic needs, like milk, bread, eggs, that stuff. It already costs $60.”
Jeanette bought her children a four pack of yogurt the other day as a treat for them. But she says it was gone within that day because food is so scarce.
“Even my family is struggling right now to even help. Usually, I’ll try to borrow money from my mom. But my mom is… She’s old. She has an old age pension…So she can only help out so much.”
The only thing that keeps her going is her kids.
“If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be here. That’s the only thing that keeps me going. And they don’t even understand it. So you go home and they’re happy, right? They don’t understand. I mean, the older one, yes, he understands. But the younger ones, they’re just, ‘Oh, mommy, can we have a candy today?’ And it’s like, ‘oh, we’ll get it tomorrow.’ You know what? Keep promising them over and over. One day, it’ll get better.”
“We’re just trying to make it every day. I don’t have money for groceries, right? To feed the kids right now. That’s why I reached out to the food bank because I have nobody to help me anymore. And we couldn’t eat. So that’s why I came. And luckily, I mean, you guys were able to help…”
Jeanette shared how grateful she was to get food for her kids from the food bank, as they had been living off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cereal.
“I’m thankful because I’m at the food bank. If I didn’t call them and you guys weren’t here today, I don’t know how I would have fed my kids.”
Through all of this, Jeanette remains positive.
“Hopefully, I’m going to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
*Name and photo are representative to protect privacy.
