This month my team is joined up in Ponce, Puerto Rico with team Crisco Unico. My team, Hijas del Rey, is working at a soup kitchen called Cristo Pobre and team Crisco Unico is working at a drug rehab and HIV patient facility called Hogar Crea.
At Cristo Pobre, we are serving breakfast and lunch to the homeless population that comes into the soup kitchen, and also organizing the attic full of clothing donations that the workers select and give to the needy. Half of our team works downstairs serving food and talking and praying with patrons, the other half works upstairs with the clothes.
The rules at Cristo Pobre, posted in the cafeteria area
For the first several days of our time here, I was on the clothing staff. When we came in, the attic was a wreck–clothes were in bags and boxes everywhere, hung up on several racks with no separation of sizes or types, and barely any walking space. One man, Pablo, runs the clothing attic, picking out clothes by their sizes and styles for specific people when they need them, and also washing people’s dirty clothes for them while they eat. Because all of the clothes were spread everywhere, when he came up to get clothes for, say, a tall, thin man, Pablo would have to dig around through piles and bags until he found a few items that were suitable. Our job was to create a system of organization for the clothes and shoes by size, style, and gender, to make Pablo’s job run more efficiently.
Clothes everywhere!
Kate, Jen, and Kayla jumping in to work
As we were sorting through the clothes, a volunteer named Lydia was upstairs showing us the ropes. She instructed us to toss out any clothes that were stained, torn, or missing buttons. This turned out to be a lot of the clothes donated, and every time I threw something away, I felt guilty about it. Why toss out a perfectly good shirt just because it had a little stain? Or toss out jeans just because the bottoms were frayed? The people receiving the clothes have so little as it is, why waste usable clothes?
The center serves lunch from 11:00am-noon, and after that people can stay as long as there is still staff or volunteers there working. After lunch is served, we all stay around to help clean up. We were asked to go through the cafeteria area and clean all of the chairs and vinyl tablecloths. The chairs were really dirty, and had probably never been thoroughly cleaned before. When we started cleaning them, we realized that we could spray them down and wipe them to sanitize them, but if we worked harder and really scrubbed them, we could make them look practically new. We spent three afternoons scrubbing each and every chair until they were as clean as they could possibly be. Then we spent a day washing all of the walls.
During the hours of cleaning after everyone had gone home, I started thinking about whether anyone would notice what had been done, or if it was even necessary. If people who have nothing are coming in for a hot meal, do they care if the chair they sit on is shiny? Or if the walls are scuff-free? I thought about how good the food they serve at Cristo Pobre is, how it’s not just sustenance. I thought again about the clothes that we threw away, and the Lord put the word “dignity” in my mind. That’s why we scrub the walls, and the chairs, and only give out clothes that are stain-free and whole. Because we are doing more than just meeting basic needs, we are offering those who have been forgotten a moment of dignity. Small acts that communicate that we aren’t just interested in the survival of the people we serve, we are also interested in their humanity.
