November 19, 2018. Jadyne and I have been volunteering Tuesdays at Christ Church for three months now. Today I added my second day, Monday, to my time at the church, and because Joe Magruder has been the lone volunteer on Monday, I joined him at 6:15 at the kitchen of the men’s shelter at the Veterans Memorial Building at 1931 Center Street, adding to my serving duties preparing the food to be distributed and described below.
Cordon Bleu, Berkeley. That’s Joe on the left, and Sam (above) and Robert on the right. Sam and Joe are volunteers. Robert is paid. He arrives at 4 am every morning and prepares food for the forty-seven residents of the shelter, serving it buffet style through the window in front of them.
Joe is stirring the “Nine Grains” cereal in a pot on the stove. To his left is a much larger pot of boiling water and oatmeal into which whatever oatmeal remains from the shelter breakfast will be added. Not pictured are eight and a half dozen eggs in another pot of boiling water. Prior to this Joe and I slathered margarine onto four or five loaves of bread and stuck them into the oven to be heated and softened. Behind me on the floor are two containers of coffee, several dozen day old doughnuts from Happy Doughnuts on Gilman, and a handful of bagels, English muffins, and assorted un-margarined pieces of bread.
Robert is removing the bread from the oven. Behind him on the steps are the coffee and doughnuts. In the front is a bowl of cut-up fruit, which will disappear immediately after we arrive at the church. Several cartons of low-fat milk will be carried to the church kitchen, which the homeless add to coffee and cereal.
Here we are at the end of this morning’s shift:
The oatmeal, Nine grains, and grits are gone. So are the eggs. A few slices of un-margarined bread remain, as does the third tray of doughnuts.
August 21, 2018. 6:08 am. After checking Google maps this morning Jadyne and I figured that by leaving now we’d arrive at Christ Church on Cedar Street in Berkeley at the appointed hour of 6:50, about ten minutes before the Dorothy Day van arrives. Google took us an unaccustomed way, down Santa Barbara until it meets Spruce, then down Spruce to Cedar, right on Cedar for two blocks. At 6:50 we climbed the steps into the dining room and sat by David, the director of the Dorothy Day program that provides breakfast six days a week, Monday through Saturday, for anyone who shows up between the hours of 7:00 and 7:50 when a final call is issued. By 8:00 the room is emptied, the diners return to the streets, and whatever food remains is packed back up into the Dorothy Day van, which then takes it to the Veterans’ Building, where it is distributed. Nothing is wasted.
At 7:00 the van pulls up, and the volunteers open the folding panels that cover the trays of buttered and unbuttered bread, bagels, doughnuts, the hard-boiled eggs, hot coffee, and the three heated pots of oatmeal, grits, and nine grains, the hot cereal that moments later Jadyne will be scooping into the Styrofoam bowls that forty homeless men (and an occasional woman or two) will be carrying. Last week someone had donated a box of bananas; today there was no fruit.
I stood next to Ron, a volunteer who has been working with this program for twelve years. He had hard-boiled about eight dozen cartons of eggs that morning, and as the diners passed by he placed them two at a time on the trays. “Buttered or unbuttered?” I asked as the diners surveyed the three trays of bread on the table, two buttered and one unbuttered. “Do you mean ‘unmargarined’? one of them asked. “I guess it’s unabunchofstuff” I replied. Olive bread, white, wheat, bagels, English muffins, all lay before them for the choosing. Wearing gloves and carrying tongs, I picked up two, three, or however many pieces of bread they requested, placing them on paper napkins on the trays. “Do you have peanut butter?” asked one. “On the table over there,” Ron responded, and the diner chose four unbuttered pieces of white bread, intending to carry a peanut butter sandwich with him, his lunch. Armin was last. The doughnut lady volunteer had three trays of leftover doughnuts from “Happy Donuts”, a Gilman Avenue staple. Cake, chocolate, glazed, sprinkles covering white and chocolate icing, a potpourri of possibilities.
This is breakfast for five of the six days . On Saturday the kitchen in the church prepares a more sumptuous meal. We’ve only heard it described.
This morning one diner carried in cut flowers. I don’t know where he found the little white vase into which he neatly arranged the flowers before choosing his tray.
“Last call. Five minutes!” Two security employees, thirty-something black men, looked around the room and encouraged latecomers to grab a tray. Dave had pointed to one of them earlier. “He was stabbed three times in the face a few months ago,” he said. “He’s homeless, too.” With only five minutes, some took the Styrofoam bowls with them, piling an empty bowl over a full one, hoping to keep the oatmeal, now thick and hard to scoop, as warm as possible. The flower man removed his cut flowers from the vase, carried them under his shoulder, and was gone. Jadyne and I carried the now empty trays back into the van, and Ron, the driver, slipped into gear and left.
We are all one…
Many of our clients can carry everything they own in eight or nine bags and take them to their homes…
