Yesterday we marched through this former industrial city where people of all races and from all countries of the world come together to live in poverty-stricken housing, work in labor pools, use soup kitchens, health centers, shelters and unemployment offices, just miles from the world's financial capital. Last night we ate in a soup kitchen hosted by St. Paul's Episcopal Church that is part of a men's shelter. Today at a soup kitchen in a poor church described as a "Haven for Women and Children", we shared lunch with 100 women and children, nurses and nursing students, pregnant mothers, families from all over the world. Regardless of language or ethnicity, everyone embraced the vision of a Right to health care, housing, and a living wage job, asking for fliers to pass out to friends, saying that they would-and had no choice-but to join us on the 30th, because they have been through too much to keep quiet any longer.

The Andrew Hamilton Housing Projects had been waiting for the funds from a state grant for a long time. They were promised the improvements last year, but the grant went to the city of Camden and they were left waiting another year. The residents at Alexander Hamilton complained that the trash chute would sometimes be backed up to the fifth floor of the building and at other times the doors to the incinerator chute would be falling off so they worried that a child might fall down them. Other residents said the smell of the trash in the building was nauseating. The basement of one of the buildings was filled with inches of standing water which had been festering for years. Residents stressed their fears for their children's health. One resident pointed out that almost half of the apartment units within the towers were boarded up because of unfit living conditions. The buildings house only but a fraction of the families that they were intended to house. And those families that they do house have to live in substandard and unsanitary conditions.

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