I had heard that members and staff in Congressional offices were pretty kind, courteous and helpful to all constituents. RESULTS, a citizens group working with low-cost, high-impact solutions for poverty and hunger, said we might expect it. Still, the atmosphere of hospitality exceeded my expectations, in virtually every office we visited on our recent trip to Washington, even where I disagreed with the voting record of the member of Congress.
It may have had something to do with the presence of my wife and foster-daughter. They viewed my apprehensions easily, and were actually being upbeat about meeting with these people. When I fretted, my wife merely soothed me. I thought she just wasn't in touch with the problem.
It began with a fresh-faced young man in his 20s who greeted us and asked if we wanted some cold water. It gets hot in Washington. We took him up on it, and he ushered us into a room where we all sat in a circle and introduced ourselves. Disagreement wasn't on the agenda, yet there were some hard questions we asked.
"There are some 1,100 Community Health Clinics around the country," we said. "Would you be willing to recommend to your boss that we quadruple their number to 4,800 to greatly help the situation of people not covered by health care at this time?" The young man smiled and we took heart. He didn't say he wouldn't recommend it, and it was apparent he saw some value in our information that these health clinics often operate on a sliding-scale basis, and get funding from various sources in the community.
RESULTS has been making contacts like this since 1980. Democratic Congressman Bruce Vento of St. Paul helped to popularize oral rehydration in the mid-1980s. He and his colleagues saved millions of lives, knocking out dehydration as the No. 1 killer in the world. Congressman Sonny Callahan (Republican of Alabama), a powerful chairman of a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives in the '80s, became a champion for children around the world after meeting with RESULTS volunteers. He considered the value of saving young lives an opportunity, and he founded the child survival fund in the U.S. foreign aid budget. Party designation seems to have no relationship to people's instincts to save lives with effective programs.
So this day, we went on to request an expansion of Medicaid to families of four with income under $33,000, to reduce the number of uninsured by a third. We asked for funding to fight AIDS, TB and malaria around the world, and money to help create universal literacy to build strong trading partners for U.S. businesses.
Our friend, the young congressional aide, looked at the information we provided, and he will pass some of it on to his boss. The relationship forged by our visit will be nurtured by further contact. We offered to be a resource in finding out other information, if he'd like it. It's really a chance for his boss to make the kind of difference in the world they both may dream of.
In a world where information is power, nobody loses as a result of our visit. Indeed, it has been said that our elected representatives are as ignorant as we let them be. My wife was favorably impressed by our visit, the young man and the process. She even spoke out with some observations and questions as we sat in the circle with the congressional aide. Maybe more impressive was the reaction of our teenage foster-daughter. She said she'd like to go along on another congressional visit sometime.
