‘Hunger isn’t just someone in Africa that’s real skinny and you can see their ribs. It’s right here in the United States. It could be right next door, and you would never know because people are too afraid to talk about it.’
--Barbie from ‘Hungry in America’
Sarah Listenbee discovered the real meaning of Christmas this year.
It wasn’t in the giving of a gift, and it wasn’t in a church service she attended. The Abington senior discovered the true meaning of Christmas in perhaps the most unlikely of all places for she found it in the North Philadelphia home of a woman she’d never met before named Barbie.
Last Thursday night, Listenbee and teammates Aiyannah Peal and Emily Willard as well as coach Dan Marsh and assistant coach Susan Vause made sure that Barbie would have a Christmas to remember, surprising the single mother of two small children with a Christmas tree, food and gifts.
“For me, just meeting Barbie and hearing her story – I think the part that really hit me was when I walked in with the toys and saw Barbie crying in a corner because she was so overwhelmed,” Listenbee said. “That hit me hard.
“On the way home, I was talking to coach Vause and just telling her how we run around and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t get that many Christmas gifts this year,’ or ‘I didn’t get what I wanted.’ These kids never had a real tree. They’ve never seen anything like all those presents. To see the light shining in their eyes when they saw all this stuff, it makes you re-think what Christmas is all about. It’s not about how many presents you got. It’s just being with family and being able to provide the little things we take for granted every day.”
Barbie’s story is a remarkable one, and Thursday’s visit capped an unlikely chain of events that began innocently enough four days earlier when Barbie – a former student of Marsh’s at Roberto Clemente Middle School - was looking up her former middle school on the internet.
“I just wrote the name of the school, and something popped up that said Roberto Clemente Alumni, so I went to the page, and I was looking through all the teachers,” Barbie recalled. “I saw (Marsh’s) page and sent him the friend request, and he immediately knew who I was and remembered me.”
Marsh asked Barbie what she had been doing, and his former student sent him a link to a YouTube video ‘Hungry in America Trailer #1.’ It included Barbie – herself a victim of hunger - speaking out against hunger as part of the Witnesses for Hunger program she helped initiate.
That was all the Abington coach needed to hear.
“I told her, ‘On Thursday I have an early game – why don’t I get your kids something to eat, and I’ll get you guys a Christmas tree,’” Marsh said. “She said, ‘I never had a Christmas tree before. That would
be so cool’
“I hung up and started thinking about it. I called my assistant coach, Susan Vause, and said, ‘We should do something here.’ I e-mailed the head of my parents association, and it just blew up from there.”
Marsh also contacted Central Bucks South coach Beth Mattern and told her the story. Just like that, the wheels were in motion for the two teams to join forces to collect food, toys and money that would be taken to Barbie’s home after Thursday afternoon’s game between the two schools.
“We pulled it off in no time,” Mattern said. “Dan and I talked about it on the phone during our jayvee games on Tuesday night.
“The beauty is we wanted to do something as a team, and nothing really came about. Then Dan called, and we all realized that was why nothing came about because this was the right thing for us to help with.”
In addition to CB South’s team donating money, the players brought money into practice on Wednesday, and they went shopping at Target that night to buy gifts. Parents who watched the video clip also wanted to get involved, and by Thursday, the Titans had collected more than $500 worth of gifts, food, winter clothing and money.
The Ghosts exceeded that total, and after Thursday’s game, players from both teams loaded two cars with gifts.
“We could only fit two girls in Marsh’s car, and we could only fit one in coach Vause’s car because her trunk and backseat were full,” Willard said. “It was amazing how much stuff we gathered. Half their living room was filled with food and gifts.
“You know how Oprah sometimes does Christmas specials – I felt like Oprah.”
Packing the car was one thing – seeing the expressions on the faces of Barbie and her two children - Leylanie (6) and Aidan (4) - when they arrived was another entirely.
“It was life changing,” Peal said. “It was really a good experience. The little boy said it was the best Christmas he ever had. I almost cried when he said that. It was a lot to take in, and I’m so glad I did that.”
“It was honestly life changing,” Willard said. “It made my Christmas.
“The little boy – when he was opening one of the gifts – said, ‘This is the best Christmas ever.’ It honestly touched all of our hearts. I loved being part of it. I knew that people were hungry, but I didn’t realize it was right in our backyard. That was a big shock to me, and to actually see it was something else. I didn’t really believe it until then. ”
For Barbie, the experience was overwhelming.
“I cried, I couldn’t stop crying, and it just felt like it was never ending,” she said. “They kept
bringing stuff, bringing stuff and bringing stuff. I wanted to introduce myself or even say ‘hi,’ but I couldn’t because I was so overwhelmed with everything – with joy, with gratitude, with relief. There were so many emotions at the same time.”
Marsh - who had maintained sporadic contact with Barbie – was Barbie’s softball coach in middle school.
“She was always that kid that was smart,” he said. “If you had to pick a kid that was going to be successful from that situation, it would have been her, but she ran into some problems in her life and wasn’t able to pursue her dreams.”
Marsh believes it’s not too late for 24-year-old Barbie to pursue her dreams. This is her story.
***
Barbie grew up with a dream, a dream of making a difference and doing something to improve life in her impoverished North Philadelphia neighborhood.
“I wanted to be a lawyer,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in the justice system. I don’t know if it’s from being a victim all my life, and I wanted to be on the other side.”
During her middle school years, Barbie’s life took a downward turn when her parents got divorced. She was angry and shared her frustration with her then softball coach Dan Marsh.
“I was 11 or 12 years old, maybe younger than that, and I remember telling him I wanted my life to be over and I hated my life and things weren’t fair,” she said. “For the first time, he really got stern with me.
“He said, ‘If you’re saying this now, you’re not going to be ready for everything that’s going to happen to you in the future.’ He told me things are going to get better, and I remember arguing with him and telling him ‘They’re not going to get better. Things never get better for me. Don’t lie to me. Don’t tell me something like that when it’s not true. You don’t know that it’s going to get better.’
“That conversation has always, always stuck with me, and every time I do go through something I remember that. I look back and I remember the point where I didn’t think I was strong enough. He tried to warn me that no matter what I was going through – it will make me the person I am. I truly believe that adversity builds character, and I am who I am because of everything I’ve been through.”
What Barbie has been through would break most, but Marsh’s former student has persevered. Her life began to change courses close to four years ago when she was near rock bottom during a visit to the emergency room at St. Christopher’s Hospital with her then 10-month-old son.
“At that time, I didn’t have any gas in my house and my son was constantly getting sick,” Barbie recalled. “It got to the point where my son was at risk for going blind, and they told me they would have to stick a needle in his eye to pull out all the mucous that was building up inside of his eye because of the frigid conditions inside the house.
“Every time I would go to the ER, there was a lady that would walk in and ask me, ‘Would you mind completing a survey, and I’ll give you a $10 gift card to Target?’ I always said no, but the day that I found out that my son might need surgery, and he was really at risk of losing his sight – the lady came in again and asked me, and I said, ‘Yes.’
“Instead of just answering her questions, I told her everything. I told her about how the father of my kids was in jail and I wasn’t working and that I was on welfare and living in a house with no gas. I told her everything.”
Barbie willingly gave the woman her phone number and one day received a call asking if she wanted to take a free yoga class. She invited several friends, and after the class was taken back to Drexel University.
“They sat me down in a big conference room and told me someone wanted to meet me,” Barbie said.
That ‘someone’ was Drexel professor Dr. Mariana Chilton.
“She told me she had an idea, and she wanted to see what it was like to be in my shoes, she wanted to know what it was like to be living in the conditions I was living in, and she wanted a little more insight into what I had told her colleague in the ER,” Barbie said. “She gave me a camera and told me to take pictures of everything. If I could explain my life through pictures, that’s what she wanted me to do.”
That meeting marked the beginning of the Witnesses for Hunger program, which grew to include 40 mothers from all over Philadelphia. The women photographed their lives, and hunger took on a face when those photos were shown at an exhibit at Drexel.
“It started off kind of like a support group,” Barbie said. “All of us would meet and talk about our similarities, our difference and our struggles.”
Eventually, Barbie was singled out as one of five women across the United States whose story would be the basis for a movie that will be released on Jan. 22 called Finding North.
“For two years, they were following my every move,” Barbie said. “If I was taking my kids in the shower, they were there. If I was brushing my teeth, they were there. If I was out shopping, they were there.
“Every time I had an event where I had to go speak, they followed me. When I started everything, I just did it because I was on welfare, I was a young single mom, and I was tired of being a statistic, I was tired of being known as this girl who’s on welfare and doesn’t want to do anything with herself.
“I really wanted to show that there are girls that regardless of our circumstances and where we come from – we have great potential. We just aren’t given the opportunities, but if they presented themselves, we would excel.”
As a result of her efforts, Barbie landed a fulltime job with the Coalition Against Hunger. She’s been employed for almost two years.
“All of a sudden I’m now being paid for it,” she said. “Just me doing this has opened so many doors.”
Barbie’s situation – although far from perfect – has improved dramatically.
“It’s nothing compared to how it was because I would go days without feeding myself,” she said. “I taught myself that when I was hungry and there wasn’t enough food, I would just look at pizzeria menus and just look at the pictures and read them over and over and over again. It would actually make me not hungry.
“I never would have imagined that it would help me, but I would just read it over and over again, and it would take the pain away. I don’t know if it was a mental thing, I don’t know what it was, but that’s what I would do when I was hungry just to make sure my kids had something to eat and that I wouldn’t be taking away from them to feed myself.”
With a fulltime job and a three-bedroom house to call her own, Barbie thought her worst days were behind her but endured her lowest point this past October.
“The same week of my daughter and my birthdays, I found out I have Type II diabetes, I have polycystic ovarian syndrome, and I had a cyst rupture in my ovaries, and at the same time, my gas and electricity were cut off,” Barbie said. “At the same time, I had my children bouncing around from house to house just so they wouldn’t have to stay in this house with me with no electricity or gas. There was no hot water, so there was no way for me to take a shower like normal people, and I couldn’t even heat water on my stove like I used to do when I would go through this when I was living with my mom because my stove wasn’t working.
“So I either took a shower in cold water or I wasn’t having a shower at all.”
Barbie endured those trying circumstances through mid-November.
“I think it hurts so much more only because I am working,” she said. “It’s not like I don’t do anything all day and expect for everything to be okay. It wasn’t like that.
“I was working fulltime, and I was in this situation. I couldn’t imagine how I went from living in domestic abuse shelters and just always running away from the situations I was in to finally being stable and having this house on my own and doing everything on my own and then going back to what I’ve experienced throughout my life.”
The electricity and gas in Barbie’s house have been turned back on, and she has been reunit
ed with her children.
On Thursday night, Barbie’s battle to survive and give her children a good life was made just a little bit easier with the visit of three Abington seniors and their two coaches.
“After everything I went through this year – with that hardship, it was something to really build me up,” Barbie said. “Spending every night in this empty, cold dark house alone – it really broke me as a person, and it made me feel like such a horrible mother that I couldn’t spend every night with my children.
“I wouldn’t even see them at night because it would be so hard to say good-bye to them. For me to go through all of that and then to have something like this happen – it made me feel like everything I went through was so worth it.
“It was truly a blessing, and it made me feel like everything I went through – I didn’t go through anything at all.”
Barbie – who received her GED when she was pregnant with Aidan – lives with the dream of returning to school and pursuing a career in criminal psychology.
“I know exactly what I want to do, but because of my financial situation I can’t right now,” she said.
In the meantime, Finding North, which will share Barbie’s personal battle against hunger, will premiere in less than a month.
“It’s scary for me since they were following me for so long,” Barbie said. “I don’t know what they have, I don’t know how they’re going to portray me and just the criticism I’m going to face from the people who don’t understand.”
She is willing to face the criticism if it can effect change in the battle against hunger in the United States, a battle that – according to the latest statistics – is being fought by nearly 49 million Americans.
URL Link to 'Hungry in America' Trailer #1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F2dbhjbWdQ&sns=em
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