Adventures in Hair Nets

Several of our ministry sites deal with food service and we spent a lot of our second week of training visiting those places. There's a meals-on-wheels-type place that delivers food to people with illnesses like HIV/AIDS or cancer; two (very early) breakfast ministries; a kitchen that distributes food to local soup kitchens. Most of these places require hair nets, so I'm getting quite used to myself in those stylish spider-webby things...

When it comes to places where we serve food directly to the homeless, I've had a couple of different experiences. One place operates out of a church and is very small and personal. The staff know the clients and have relationships with them, but no more than 70 people or so are fed. The other ministry, S.O.M.E., (you may have heard of it), serves over 700 people each meal.

At the first ministry we had too many volunteers so the CSM staff spent the morning interacting with the people who'd come to eat breakfast. I thought that was really cool; it made everything feel more friendly. At S.O.M.E., though, it's really important to make sure everyone who shows up can be fed, so we hustle people in and out pretty quickly. At one point I was replacing napkins and silverware at one end of a table while people were still eating at the other end. I almost felt like I was erasing evidence that the people had ever been there and it felt really weird.

So, because of that, I much prefer the first ministry. People are definitely people there. But I guess the city needs both places, because S.O.M.E. can fill the stomachs of many hungry people whereas the other site just doesn't have that kind of capacity. D.C. has a lot of need; if all the breakfast kitchens were small and personal, well, there probably wouldn't be enough food to go around.

I think the groups will like both sites because even though they're early, you leave at the end of the morning seeing a tangible result: people's needs being clearly met. Of course that isn't everything, but it can be good to get that gratification sometimes throughout the week.