It is lunch hour at Brother’s Keeper Soup kitchen and the line is long. As soon as the “closed” sign is turned around to read “open”, they begin filing in.
Sister Concepta hands out tuna sandwiches to guests. She looks over the heads of people for one particular woman, but doesn’t see her.
Volunteers serving up salad and soup are on the lookout for her too. The woman has dishwater blond, long, stringy hair. She is somewhere in her 30’s or early 40’s. It is hard to say for sure. She’s aged early.
A regular almost every day of the week, you’d never know this woman had anything to eat. The kitchen crew has noticed she keeps getting thinner. Plus, there are bruise marks on her face and arms, signs she is being abused.
The guess is that she’s doing prostitution to get some money and being beaten up by johns. Sister is worried the homeless woman needs more than one meal can do and has set aside extra food for her. Although the crew is on the lookout for a thin, bruised woman, she doesn’t show that day or the next. Everyone starts to worry.
Homelessness, hunger and hurt are ingredients seen every day of the week at the soup kitchen. For those who come to work as kitchenn volunteers just on high holy days, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, the amount of pain each of the guests bring through the door will shock them. So will the amazing dignity and resilience of the human spirit – the person who has nothing but stops on his way out to say thank you and tell you that the crew is a blessing.
This time of year is especially rough on the last, the lost and the least. We’re entering Ho Ho Ho season and the irony of all the hype is not lost on the less fortunate.
Buy Christmas presents? Forget it.Not going to happen.
A decorated Yule tree? Where would they put it, in a parking lot?
Thanksgiving dinner? Only if the Soup Kitchen and Salvation Army are serving.
Home for the holidays? Not a chance.
Go to the store and get ingredients for a pumpkin pie? No money, no stove, no way.
Even without watching television, reading the newspaper or listening to the radio, the pressure of the season reaches those on the rock bottom. They know what time of year it is and many have memories to prove it. Memories of better days when there was a roof over their head and turkey on the table. These are cruel memories to conjure up as they stand in line at the soup kitchen.
A couple more days go by. The really thin woman doesn’t come in. But there are some other women who come dangerously close to fitting that description. One woman always wears a cell phone clipped to the left side of her belt. It never rings. She seldom makes eye contact. Some of the kitchen crew tries to give her an extra salad or sandwich. She refuses. It is as though the thinner you get, the harder it is to eat anything.
Some of the regulars have their own routine.
One man brings a battered pickup truck to the soup kitchen and takes away things like leftover donuts and soup to feed his pigs. Although he doesn’t say it, the kitchen crew knows some people are being fed too. They always try to have something extra for the pig man.
Another man comes pushing a shopping cart. He only has one leg and uses the cart for balance. He refuses to come inside and sit down, so a tray is fixed for him. He eats standing outside at the cart. The crew started giving him softer things to eat when someone noticed that he has no teeth.
For those who have three meals a day and access to more, this is the time of year non-profits are asking for donations to their pantries for Thanksgiving and Christmas bags of food.
Oxfam goes one step further and asks you to skip a meal the Thursday before Thanksgiving as part of Fast for a World Harvest. That’s come and gone but you can fast for one meal anytime. Take the money that meal would have cost and contribute it to Oxfam or your local soup kitchen pantry.
Skipping a meal has an added bonus. You’ll have more empathy for the homeless who skip meals not as an option but because there is no other alternative.
On the Oxfam Web site, www.oxfamamerica.org/fast play the banquet game. It is a group of people sitting around a table. Click on one and learn their story. Then try to decide what they should do to put food on the table. Like the small coffee farmer who sees joining a co-op would mean more money for his coffee, but the co-op members are being threatened with violence by the government. What choices would you make?
Hunger is real. More than 850 million people around the world go to bed hungry. And some of them, maybe more than you know, live near you.
The soup kitchen crew is still looking for the thin woman with the bruises. And the line out the door of men, women and children waiting to come in for a meal, gets longer every day. What would you do to end hunger where you live?
Lucy Tobias is a freelance writer and former newspaper columnist, winner of numerous awards. She is currently working on a book “50 Great Walks in Florida” and is a volunteer at the Brother’s Keeper Soup Kitchen in Ocala. She is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
©2005 by Lucy Tobias. All rights reserved.