the Oasis

A belated Christmas-themed party brings hot food to some who’ve not had it in days, and welcomes two kinds of travelers most shelters don’t.

By Scott Morgan, Managing Editor
Jan. 21, 2026

Note: This story discusses an attempted suicide.

Rock Hill – Sugar surprises us. Partly because no one expected her. Mostly because she never makes a sound.

She skitters under the table, slaloming around the table legs, the chair legs, and Destiny’s feet.

“ She’s saved our life, on multiple occasions,” Destiny says. “We would be in a deep sleep because of it being so cold and we [were] huddled down. There has been times people have came up literally trying to kill us. And if it wasn’t for her alerting us and her waking us up, we wouldn’t be here right now.”

Destiny’s scarlet hair glimmers in the late morning sun as she tells me this, as casually as if she were telling me about a bad call in a football game the night before. People in Rock Hill know her, she says. They know her mother. It makes trouble for her.

She doesn’t elaborate.

Johnny, Destiny’s boyfriend and companion, sinks deeper into his light gray hoodie. He nods. Some people out in the streets, he says, “are mental.”

He doesn’t elaborate either.

Destiny and Johnny are just glad to be here, where it’s warm and where there’s food. Past the windows, the temperature outside has reached the 40s. About three hours ago, it was barely over 20. 

Clear across town, Destiny and Johnny and Sugar woke from the ground on which they all slept and walked in the freezing air to get here. No one had tried to harm them last night. But no one had tried to help them either.

Close to noon, they made it here on the promise of food and warmth and clothes. It’s another moment of life, farthest from the bone, where it’s most about survival.

“This is a lifesaver right now,” Destiny says of this event. She means it literally.

“This,” Johnny says, “is the only hot meal we’ve had in the past two, three days.”

Half an hour ago …

From the bottom of The Mercantile’s steps, I’m directed upstairs to look for a woman in a loud Christmas sweater. I will know her, I’m told, when I see her.

In the middle of January, Lauryn Eaddy’s tyrannosaur Christmas sweater doesn’t disappoint, even as it tries to hide behind an equally colorful long jacket. Eaddy is dressed to party. I find her laying out folded clothes on a table.

“ Nobody should go without food,” she says. (Tee shirt. Sweater)  “And people are expected to carry on normally, like, you know, just a regular day (Other sweater). But I mean, how are you functioning? You don’t know where your next meal is gonna come from.”

Today, the next meal for about 100 people will come from volunteers taking part in an event sponsored by Eaddy and her business partner, Yatta Gayflor. The two operate Cornell2Cornell, which Eaddy describes as “ a pending licensed nonprofit organization that provides transitional housing” and supportive services to  young adults.

Right now, the business is registered as an LLC in Kingstree, but Eaddy sees it evolving into a broad, nonprofit social services provider that will roll out in two phases.

“Our phase two is working with young adults and children in custody of DSS,” the state Department of Social Services, she says. 

Eaddy’s dino-Christmas sweater and kaleidoscope jacket are a month late. This event, the Christmas Community Fridge Affair!, complete with exclamation point, was supposed to happen in December, but had to be moved to Jan. 20 because of a busy and booked-up holiday season at The Mercantile shop space.

Like Cornell2Cornell, the aim here is twofold – first, to put out free warm clothes and hot meals for people experiencing housing and food insecurity in the city; second, to “fill the fridge outside,” she says.

The fridge outside is The Mercantile’s year-round community fridge for people who need something to eat. The hot meals inside today are things like chicken-and-dumplings and lasagne, dished out by volunteers like David Handman. 

Handman sips a tall hot drink he got downstairs and muses on what’s compelled him to volunteer today. It’s what he’s noticed at the ring of local prayer boxes, where people leave nonperishable food and items for anyone who needs them.

The food, Handman, says, disappears fast from those boxes. We trade stories of having added items to prayer boxes only to see them gone within an hour, without ever seeing anyone take anything.

It illustrates how hidden hunger can really be, even in public, he says. “There clearly is a need.”

The need, in numbers

The numbers can only tell you so much, but here’s what they say:

According to Feeding America, as of 2023, the last year for which data are available, about one in ten residents of York County is considered to be food insecure. The numbers are about the same for children and overall.

But they jump to 16% for Hispanic residents and 24% for Black residents of the county. 

Food Is Medicine South Carolina identifies fully one in five county residents as being at risk for food insecurity.

And of the residents considered by Feeding America to be food insecure overall, two in three live above the eligibility threshold for federal food aid programs like SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. 

The number of those receiving SNAP benefits dropped steadily throughout last year.

According to DSS, there were 20,531 adults and children who received SNAP benefits in January of 2025 in York County. By December, the total number of recipients was 18,709.

Almost half of people benefitting from SNAP were younger than 18; two in three recipients were female.

The need, in this room

I sit down as gently as I can, trying vainly to not interrupt something I rarely find where hunger is concerned – a full family.

Chris and Kirsten welcome me immediately, while Kirsten’s two sons play a makeshift game of something resembling volleyball and rugby with some balloons.

The boys are having a blast running around on the floor. At the table, there are multiple plates of food. 

Chris is Kirsten’s boyfriend. They knew each other once, then lost touch, then reconnected with – literally – no time to spare before Chris was about to die.

“ It’s kind of a dark story,” Chris says. “About ending my life and she saved it.”

He’d gone to Indiana. For a girl.

“ I got out there, the girl told me that she didn’t want nothing to do with me,” he says. “I left the suicide note, phone, and everything on the table and walked out the door early in the morning.”

He walked into the street, to step “in front of a semi-truck,” he says, “when the person that I was staying with, her sister, grabbed me by my hood and said, ‘Some girl texted. She said, please come home.’ That was her.”

A moment before I sat at their table, I watched Chris and Kirsten hold hands, while the boys vied for (and got) their attention. Now, as Kirsten takes another bite of her lunch, Chris smiles and she dips her gaze. It’s shy and loving. They’re together six years now.

Both Chris and Kirsten work in fast food. When it’s slow, Chris fixes himself some food to help fill his belly.

This meal is one of the heftier ones the family has sat down to in a while. Kirsten used to be able to get help to buy more food.

“ This actually helped out a good bit because my food stamps got cut due to my hours,” she says, referring to SNAP. She works 41 hours a week, and makes too much to meet the SNAP threshold.

I ask if she was ever tempted to scale back her hours to requalify for SNAP.

“ I tried,” she says. “With the financial issues, I ended up losing my car due to me cutting my hours back.”

Like her longtime friend, Destiny, Kirsten is grateful for the hot meal. She’s also is struggling to figure out how to balance full-time work with a family she can’t just walk out on. For Destiny, who cannot work, her family includes Sugar. For Kirsten, it’s the boys.

If Chris and Kirsten have one advantage among other guests to this belated Christmas party, it’s that they are housed, and don’t have to make the calculus Destiny and Johnny have made – to sleep outside or search for the rare shelter that will accept them as a full family, knowing how hard it will be to find one.

If they have another advantage, says Yatta Gayflor, best friend and business partner of Lauryn Eaddy – and direct fashion counterpoint to the colorful Christmas attire, in her heather gray sweater and black knit hat – it’s that Chris and Kirsten are together.

Fathers, Gayflor says, aren’t usually part of the picture in hungry families.

“ Most of the times we have events, we see single mothers and their children,” she says. “Very seldom we see a father, a mother and the children. I just think that that’s really amazing.”

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