You Call this Food?

I have sunk as low as I can get.
Well, as low as I intend to get. Famous last words eh?

I have drained my parents of money and time and physical effort – just to make my house liveable.
I have spent every cent I made in the last 11 weeks of work on any bill that had mine and The Man’s name.
I begged, borrowed and camped on a friend’s lounge room floor in order to get my son to hospital in Adelaide for his tonsillectomy, and then overdrew my bank account to get us both home.
I have frozen my mortgage payments, my rates and am ignoring my final power bill from my previous home.

The employment agency I have been going to, every day since I got here, doesn’t feel that I qualify for assistance for at least 13 weeks – because by then, we actually will be starving and considering bankruptcy.

I have cried at CentreLink more often, now, than I ever have at weddings. (Although, looking back, I should have shed a few more tears at my own.)
In fact, apparently I was too convincing when I first showed up at CentreLink and they didn’t put me down as eligible for any of their programs as I appear to be a very capable young woman who doesn’t need too much help.
Apparently they can get the employment agency moving to help me find work, they can get my TafeSA fees supplemented and my medical bills reimbursed, they can get me counseling for me and the kids and free fucking petrol back and forwards from any work I do get!
Why is it, that you have to be loser to get help?

But, despite that little insight into the potential help I’m entitled to – it wasn’t cash.
As my overdraw fees had cancelled out my parenting payments, I found myself with $25 to my name this week – just enough for petrol to get me to the closest bank (38km away) to find out I had nothing left - so I went to Uniting Care and asked for a food parcel.

Firstly, I asked them for a job (they’ve got a couple going which I am applying for), and then I asked for a food parcel.

Do you know what a food parcel consists of?
Weetbix, frozen bread loaves, spaghetti sauce, powdered milk, Tom Yum soup, baked beans and two-minute noodles.
No fresh meat, no apples for my kids’ lunches, nothing greener than the shopping bags it all came in.
The only protein in the two shopping bags-full was a dozen farm eggs, obviously donated by local producers (thankyou, thankyou).
There are people who LIVE on these parcels, three times a month!
It’s a wonder they don’t all have scurvy!
If I get this bloody ‘food development’ job I want, I’m going to set up a network with the local primary producers (and this is SA’s centre for stone-fruits, apples, seafood, grain, cucumbers, capsicums and zucchinis) to supplement that program.
Not to mention providing people with some kind of ‘staying healthy on a budget’ cookbook.

Ironically, within half an hour of taking receipt of my high-carb low-protein rickets-inducing food parcel I was offered a couple of weeks work and my Mum rang me to say she’d just won $400 at the pokies – which, she insists, she never really plays.

I don’t believe in God, but I think I definitely have to believe in kharma this year.
For every lesson I learn in this whole nasty mess, there’s a little reward to keep me positive as well.

Now, please, what every great wheel of fate is turning over the top of me, right at this minute, I just want you to know that I have learned my lesson.
I see my faults, I swear I’m not going to make the same mistakes again, so please – can you swing me back around to the top now so I can get a little sunshine back, instead of having my nose rubbed in the mud again.