Food stamp family buys in bulk, travels for deals

Dana Lone Hill makes the money stretch

By Kevin Woster, Journal staff | Friday, November 23, 2007

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The Food Stamp Challenge is more than a public-education project for Dana Lone Hill of Pine Ridge.

It's also her life.

Every day is a food stamp challenge for Lone Hill, a 35-year-old mother of four who makes do largely on federal food-stamp assistance and revenue from hand-crafted beadwork and a local newspaper column.

As a food-stamp recipient herself, Lone Hill understands the daily struggle to make the limited government support stretch to meet her family's food needs. She signed up to participate in the Food Stamp Challenge, sponsored by the Community Food Banks of South Dakota and Bread for the World South Dakota to highlight the daily struggles of food-stamp recipients.

"I'm only doing it to bring awareness," Lone Hill said. "A lot of people have no idea what it's like. It doesn't last every week. When it runs out, you have to have something else. I have my beadwork. I can't imagine people who don't have something else."

Getting people to realities beyond their own kitchens and dining rooms is the goal of the Food Stamp Challenge, both in South Dakota and in other states that also have their own version of the project. The challenge asked participants to go for one week spending no more than $21 each on food.

Matt Gassen, executive director of the Community Food Banks of South Dakota in Sioux Falls, said 12 to 15 people signed up for the challenge throughout the state. Some did the entire week, which ran officially from Nov. 11-17. Others did a few days All learned something about living on food stamps, Gassen said.

"I felt it was imperative if they could just do a few days, to create awareness of what it was like to have to live on that tight of a food budget," Gassen said.

Pastor Dave Van Kley and his wife, Arlene, of Custer Lutheran Fellowship accepted the challenge. Van Kley even kept a daily diary of his week. (See his diary on Page A2.)

Van Kley also noted a low-grade hunger through much of the week, as if he was never entirely satisfied, and wondered what that would be like for weeks and months at a time, instead of just seven days. On the fifth day of the challenge, he wrote: "Once again, I am grateful that I only have two more days left of this and can't help thinking about those who must live this way all the time."

Dana Lone Hill and her four children do that. They get slightly more than the average of $21 per person a week; for a total for the five recipients,the Lone Hills get about $635 a month. She receives more in Pine Ridge than she did while living in Pierre.

"The benefits vary," Gassen said. "Some are higher, some are lower, but $21 a week is the average here."

If Lone Hill's allocation seems comfortable, she challenges others to make it feed five people in an isolated landscape where low-cost supermarkets are far away. She makes the 100-mile round-trip each week to buy in bulk groceries in Chadron, Neb., but also stops at a small grocery in Rushville, Neb., where she finds good deals on high-quality meats.

"With two teen boys and one 9-year-old who can eat more than the two put together, it doesn't ever last," Lone Hill said.

Gassen said the transportation and other challenges, as well as rising grocery prices, can make $635 disappear quickly into five mouths.

"You have to look at where she lives, the transportation problems, the fact that she doesn't have immediate access to grocery thrift stores," Gassen said. "That $635 doesn't go as far as many people think it would."

Lone Hill had more food-store options when she was living off the reservation in bigger towns and cities. But she eventually came home with her children because she believed they would benefit from the comfortable Lakota culture and surroundings.

"I left the reservation with the same pipe dreams any 18-year-old has of living a better life," she said. "It was OK; I had some good jobs. But I still lived at low income. I came back to be home amongst my family, raise the kids more around their culture, and hopefully have a better life here."

She plans to attend tribal college next year, hoping for a degree, a good job and a way off food assistance. Meanwhile, federal food stamps will remain an essential, if often misunderstood, reality in Dana Lone Hill's world.

"It's not easy," she said. "The money never lasts."

She hopes the Food Stamp Challenge will help more people understand that.

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com