‘Warden takes care of its own’

WARDEN — As Ed Backell walks up to the front door of the tiny Warden Food Pantry, he looks down to see a yellow plastic sack sitting on the front porch.

It’s filled with cans. A donation left anonymously.

“Warden takes care of its own,” he said.

The donation is needed. The shelves inside the food pantry — an old irrigation district water master building the city rents for $1 per year — aren’t quite bare, but a couple of hungry families could clean the place out.

“I need to go grocery shopping,” Backell said as he surveyed the pantry’s stocks.

The pastor at Warden Community Church, Backell is one of the few full-time clergy to both live and minister in Warden. He’s been pastor at the church — built and founded by German Congregationalists more than a century ago when the town was started — for 12 years, coming to Eastern Washington from the West Side.

“I love it here,” he said. “It's a great place to live. We've really enjoyed raising our kids here. Now we've got a grandchild with us and my sister just moved to town and bought a house, so I really can't leave.”

Backell, who is overall coordinator of the food pantry, said his church shares running the food pantry with Warden Assembly, an Assemblies of God congregation in town and Queen of All Saints Catholic Parish, with each congregation managing the food bank for a month in turn. Right now, it’s the Warden Community Church’s turn, Backell said, and running the food pantry is one way they live out their calling to love their neighbors and help the poor.

“That's my understanding of the food pantry,” he said. “Each church is pretty autonomous in how they run it. If we're really low on food, they can run a food drive, or we can go and purchase or people can donate. Sometimes a combination of all three.”

“So it's pretty neat to see how the whole community kind of comes together to support the food pantry to help people who are maybe feeling a little too much month at the end of the money,” he added.

The Warden Food Pantry gives out food every Thursday afternoon from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. to any Warden resident who comes, Backell said.

“There's very little process to it. If you show up at that time and you need food, we give you food,” he said. “And it's been working pretty well. Some weeks we have only five, six or seven families show up, and some weeks we have 25. We never know. So we just want to be as prepared as we can to help as many people as we can.”

The food pantry is always taking donations of either cash or food, Backell said, and members of the Warden Community Church frequently donate a little something — either cash or food items — as part of the congregational mission.

However, Backell said he is troubled by not being able to do more to help people in need, even as he acknowledges that helping people get through tough times with a little food.

“My biggest frustration that I don't have a way to address is that there are some people who have kind of a comprehensive set of needs,” he said. “The other parts that people might need help with, we don't have a way to tie together all of those parts (so) that people can really get all the help that they need. That hurts.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeathrstone@columbiabasinherald.com.

Want to help? Need help?

To make a donation to the Warden Food Pantry, or if you need help, contact Pastor Ed Backell at 509-349-2509 or check out the Warden Food Pantry’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/wardenfoodpantry.