Carnival a healing touch for an ailing community

It was a day of fun and games for children whose lives are usually anything but.

On Friday, St. Christopher's Hospital for Children held a back-to-school carnival at Lighthouse Field, across the street from the East Erie Avenue hospital in North Philadelphia.

The carnival looked like any such event being held in the area these days, where children are offered backpacks filled with school supplies, along with food and a chance to play in the sunshine.

But St. Christopher's sits in the First Congressional District, one of the poorest, hungriest places in the United States. Children from there know daily deprivation like few others.

"My own kids do things all the time, but this is the only event these children have all summer," said Renee Turchi, a St. Christopher's pediatrician and a professor at Drexel University's School of Public Health.

She organized the carnival, which, she said, could not happen until volunteers removed needles and drug vials from the field earlier in the day. The neighborhood is among the most drug-ridden in the region, police statistics show.

Hunger is so rampant in the area that St. Christopher's doctors give parents prescriptions for food, redeemable in co-ops working with the hospital.

A hospital clinic cares for children diagnosed with failure to thrive, a condition of arrested growth often attributable to the inability of a child to get enough food.

The hospital even allows a vendor to set up his produce stand within the building so parents can buy healthy foods for their children - if they can afford it.

Turchi and her colleagues see patient after patient from birth to age 3 with adversely developing brains due to a dearth of good nutrition.

"And that's not reversible," said Turchi, who is also the medical director of St. Christopher's Center for Children with Special Health Care Needs.

Accustomed to visiting the homes of some of the very children eating rice, beans, chicken, and bananas at the carnival, Turchi, 41, said she knows the troubles these children have experienced in cramped apartments all too well.

One child had post-traumatic stress disorder because a person living downstairs shot bullets up into the living room where the child was sitting, Turchi said. Now home feels unsafe.

For many children, domestic violence is a too common occurrence in homes where resources are squeezed to nearly nothing and stress runs high, she said. Young mothers "not reading Parents magazine" run out of formula and feed condensed milk instead. Many give their babies juice, mistakenly believing it's healthful, Turchi said.

For Turchi and her colleagues, then, the sight of children running, dancing and eating their fill on Friday was a balm of sorts, a doctors' holiday from near-endless distress.

"For us, this is a great time," Turchi said, smiling and drinking a bottle of water.

Kermin Campos, 25, of Kensington, was having a good day, too - for a change.

The mother of a healthy 5-year-old girl, as well as a 21-month-old son who was born prematurely, Campos said she went to the carnival to get her little girl out of the house and into a safe environment.

"I wouldn't allow her outside our place without me," said Campos, an out-of-work housecleaner looking to join the National Guard.

Campos, who lives with a partner who is unemployed, said she has gone as long as two days without eating during the year. "My kids, at least, are eating something," she said.

Delores Howe, 61, was at the carnival with grandson Keith, 15, who suffers from cerebral palsy.

"I'm used to giving up food for him," said Howe, a divorced housecleaner. "It's hard. You ask yourself, 'Can you handle stress day to day without food?' "

Taylor Orilas, grateful for a day to let her 7-year-old twin girls eat as much as they wanted, said that even though she has a full-time, customer-service job paying $11.75 an hour, she lives in near poverty. And she has to skip meals so her girls can grow.

"It makes me want to work harder, so my girls have an education and do better than me," Orilas said. "It makes you want things to change."

Just then, her daughter Jamie tugged on Orilas to take her to play a game. Orilas smiled. "Today," she said, allowing herself to be dragged off, "is a good day."