Blisters (A Reprise of Lobby Day 2007)

Photo: Bread for the World

On Tuesday, June 10, a few hundred Bread members will converge on Capitol Hill to urge our members of Congress to support immigration reform and reject changes to the food-aid program that hurt the hungry.  The issues that we bring to Congress change from  year to year (and sometimes they are similar to prior years), but there are some things that remain constant: the passion and dedication of anti-hunger advocates. In that spirit, I am reprinting a blog post that I wrote seven years ago about Lobby Day.

Blisters on Lobby Day 
(originally published in Bread blog, June 23, 2007)

Can you get blisters on Lobby Day? Sure you can. (And I don’t mean those kinds of “blisters” you get on your ego after a disappointing visit with an uninterested or combative congressional aide). I’m talking about the blisters that torture your feet when you wear the wrong type of shoes as you scurry from one appointment to another at Longworth to Cannon  buildings on the House side and then to Hart office building on the other side of Capitol Hill and back to Longworth. (OK, we took the Metro from Union Station back to the House side).

Image: Church World Service

It happened to one member of our party during Lobby Day 2007. She made the mistake of wearing the wrong type of shoes to our congressional visits and at times had to walk barefoot on the hot sidewalk. But she was a good sport, and dutifully went along on all five of the appointments with our U.S. representatives and senators from New Mexico. (Not to mention the frequent re-enactment of the visit to Rep. Udall's office for a camera crew working on a video about Bread for the World).

And fortunately, there was relief. Another member of our party came prepared with a handful of band-aids. And all were used. But like so much of the legislation our Congress approves, a band-aid is just a “band-aid.” The best solution to our dilemma came when another member of our party discovered that she wore the same size of shoes (comfortable shoes) as the one who had the uncomfortable shoes. So she offered to trade for a little while. And isn’t this the spirit that we want Congress to adopt when considering anti-hunger and anti-poverty legislation?