(ABOUT THE SNAP CHALLENGE: Humanity House has invited residents of Allen County to participate in the SNAP Challenge through July. Participants are asked to feed their families for one month on the amount of money that a SNAP recipient receives based on income and size of household.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly “food stamps”) limits purchases to edible items and excludes pre-cooked items. Throughout July, the Register will touch base with challenge participants like Amanda Thompson and Chris Belknap, at left, as well as actual SNAP recipients, like Dorothy Aronis, above. Thompson’s story runs on Page A5.)
Dorothy Aronis is raising her three young daughters in a small public housing apartment down a dead end street on the east side of Iola. She is 27 years old. Jessica, her oldest, is 12. Tasha is 7. Tammy is 3. They have a new puppy, Rick, a black lab-shepherd mix with a white trapezoidal patch on his chest, who has, complains Aronis, neither “bite control” nor “very good social skills.”
On Wednesday morning, Aronis’ small kitchen table was strewn with schoolwork. A book of Maya Angelou poems lay open next to a laptop. Aronis is currently taking online classes through Post University. In person, Aronis is smart, articulate, warm. Tammy, her 3-year-old, a smiling mop of blond curls in a pair of bright green pajamas, sits on her mother’s lap, busy with a pencil and notepad.
Four years ago Aronis was diagnosed with lupus and forced to abandon her work as a CNA at a local nursing home. “Lupus affects people in different ways,” explains Aronis. In her case, the inflammatory disease is attacking her skin, muscles, joints. Her bones are deteriorating. Her teeth, which were crumbling in her mouth and driving a pain through each nerve ending every time she chewed, were eventually pulled, leaving the 27-year-old with a full set of dentures.
“A lot of people want to put a stigma on families who are on food stamps,” says Aronis. She sees it on Facebook all the time: “People post and say ‘I saw a man who was buying Mountain Dew and steak.’ … They’ll say that we buy junk food and all of that. My kids are lucky if they taste junk food once a month.”
Aronis and her daughters live on just more than $1,000 a month. She receives $753 in disability benefits and $349 in food assistance (SNAP). “I used to make a monthly menu. The kids knew what we were eating every day of the month, because it hung on the fridge.”
“I get my food stamps on the first because my last name starts with ‘A’ and so, typically, I go grocery shopping on the first. Because I have a tiny freezer, I can’t buy a month’s worth of food. I buy about two weeks’ worth and then, when the freezer gets low, I go grocery shopping again.”
JESSICA, Aronis’ oldest daughter, and her friend Payton shuffle into the kitchen in search of breakfast. Payton slept over. Aronis suggests peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. “We had that last night,” says Jessica, who’s already using her hands to break up the hard contents in a package of Ramen noodles. “Or Ramen,” says Aronis. The two preteens return to a realm of some higher gossip and Aronis continues.
“We eat a lot of pasta. Spaghetti is cheap to make. Goulash is cheap to make. Chicken is the cheapest meat possible, and you can cook it a hundred different ways.” Walmart sells family packs of pork chops: Aronis will eat one piece, Jessica eats another, and the younger girls, Tasha and Tammy, split one. “And, as you can tell, Ramen noodles are a big thing here.
“And allrecipes.com is the greatest invention ever,” says Aronis. “Because when it gets down to the end of the month, you can plug in whatever ingredients you still have available and they will give you all kinds of recipes for those ingredients.”
“Look!” says Tammy, squealing with laughter. She’s drawn a dinosaur and, next to it, a banana.
One of the unfair facts in life is that some people are dealt a harder beginning than others, and that one uninvited calamity in your past can bend the direction of your entire life. It was this way for Aronis.
Aronis moved to Iola, by way of Missouri, from Cody, Wyo., when she was 14. That same year she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, and, in that act, became pregnant with Jessica. Aronis was promptly shuttled into foster care, where she remained for a year, before being reunited with her mother after the boyfriend was sent to prison.
