Cherry Street Mission

"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".
--- Stephen Jay Gould

Over one of my visits to Grace Lutheran Church, I'd found that they volunteer to serve food to the poor and homeless (which are more than abundant in this over-wealthy Kingdom of God). They do this at Cherry Street Mission every 3^rd Friday of each month.

Although watching the poor always makes me sad, I've always enjoyed helping others. In this case, it could serve me in both a personal and professional way. This could be an opportunity to observe how a charity food service (with people queuing) would look like here.

In my country and my culture, dignity of the needy is more important than merely stuffing their stomach. That's what we've been taught by our ultimate exemplar, Imam Ali, when he fed the poor at the pitch of the dark (veiled while doing so). Maybe those times (and of course people of those times) are long passed. And to be realistic, it's difficult to do it that way in big cities of our time. Anyway.

I signed up for Jan 19 (the earliest available slot). I more or less had a feeling that such food service (without actually cooking and taking the food to the poor) is mostly a ritual for people who'd like to do some sort of volunteering. And as the saying goes, there's no such thing as free lunch; such food servings would almost always be accompanied by preaching (spreading the word of God by way of food). Yet, as a Sociologist, I preferred to participate and have an observation.

When we arrived in the kitchen (through the backdoor), food had been already cooked and we were supposed to just fill the dishes and hand them out through the window. I felt very uneasy about merely acting as food-distributor while everything else had been already done by others. I had a quick look at the lounge before beginning with the job. People were leaning back, watching TV and waiting for the kitchen window blind to go up.

We wore gloves and hair mesh (both are sanitary must in every kitchen here). Then we prayed hand in hand and asked God to bless us with what we were going to do. The job seemed fairly easy; each of us would assume part of the assembly line, filling the slots in the tray (first bread, then meal, then baked corn, then cookie) and putting the tray on the counter with smiles and a "God Bless You". I asked God to help me perform less showy and more practical.

The window blind went up and we were welcomed by those hungry guys' applause (God knows how uneasy I felt with that) and we waved back as part of the ritual.

I'd chosen the last part in the assembly line, not only because I love anything involved with cookies (what's better than being the person delivering those cookies to people), but also that position (last part) made me the person to hand out the tray and hence enabling to interact directly with the recipient of the food. Because of space limitation, I had to assume the role of filling-in the baked corn also, before placing the cookies and raising the tray to the counter. So, I had to be quick doing all that (preventing the queue to jam) and yet be efficient not to make a mess on the tray (pouring baked corn over other slots). Poor people are entitled to their dignity and they usually feel sensitive about a messy hand-out thrown at them as the poor.

Focusing on efficiency and swiftness of my food-handling job at the same time, wouldn't let me analyze the people too closely or make an accurate demography. Yet, I could make some observations: not all (or even majority of them) were black, they were almost even in terms of race; I could see old, middle aged and young lads almost evenly distributed; almost all of them were male; a lot wore beards (so, I was not a black sheep there). Actually, one of them pointed at my face and said: looks like Jesus is serving me (well, Jesus did not wear glasses). This was the best thing I could've heard on that day.

Some smiled genuinely, some just appeared to be smiling and some were clearly unhappy with being fed this way. And there was something I expected to observe: I could see many interesting faces that definitely didn't belong to streets (hence, the quote at the beginning of this post). I just wish I could have a talk with them.

This is another controversial issue. Contrary to what right-wing critics tend to envision, not all misfortunate homeless people are necessarily despicable misfits; they are just less-endowed people in a highly stratified society. And here's the irony, neo-liberals who politically side with neo-cons (and so-called right-wing Christians) believe that social welfare is waste of money and resources. And they succeeded greatly to implement their view of welfare reform over the tenure of Ronald Reagan (a Christian President) and those policies are going to be firmly established in American public policy during George W. Bush term (another Christian President).

Such debates have found their way into religious circles also. Despite all the emphasis in Christian beliefs and teachings of Jesus Christ to help the poor, some people argue that feeding the poor on a regular basis would make them accustomed to their status quo as a routine and would drive them into laziness and lead them evade working. Sounds reasonable, but one still wonders.