Las Vegas Catholic Worker
After participating in the Nevada Desert Experience’s Holy Week Peace Walk of 60 miles from Las Vegas to the Nevada Test Site, I had an extra half day that I got to spend working with the Vegas Catholic Worker.
While they also run a dry food distribution, do housing for folks who wouldn’t otherwise have a house to live in, and host “hospitality days” where unhoused folks can come to the CW house to do laundry, get a shower, and half a sit down meal, the biggest energy project for the LVCW is their breakfast served on the street several mornings a week.
I happened to be there on the biggest most exciting day of the month: Pancake Day! One Saturday each month the local Knights of Columbus show up at 4 in the morning with their electric griddles and volunteers and cook pancakes and sausage for the breakfast line. This is supplemented with grits and a veggie filled cheesy potato and egg scramble prepared by the Catholic Workers. About a dozen trays of pancakes were cooked for the morning and 4 - 10 gallon pots.
I’ve visited the Vegas CW in the past and while the potato egg scramble has become a regular item in the past I’ve seen them do mac and cheese and pasta and other big pot dishes.
Since covid all the meals are now served pre boxed in little folding cardboard containers (think chinese food boxed but brown and without the metal wire) and bagged with cutlery. Coffee too is pre poured in to-go cups.
After the food is ready two parallel assembly lines of volunteers are set up to make these pre-bagged meals.
Once everything is ready to go, it's all loaded into a big trailer and transported to where it will be served. Volunteers too jump in their cars and everyone drives about a ½ mile to the serving location.
For many years the Vegas Catholic Workers served their meal in a vacant lot. They’d set up 3 or 4 pots with 2 servers at each pot in order to get food to folks quickly and decrease the length of lines and correspondingly the amount of time folks are forced into proximity to each other and thus the chances for frayed nerves or disruptions.
But more recently as part of the city’s anti-homelessness policies vacant lots have been fenced off all across the area, including the one previously used by the Vegas CW. There has been no corresponding improvement of conditions for folks on the street. There are still as many homeless people as ever. The policy exists only to deter people from being around (where else will they go?) and has only made the CW’s serving harder.
So now the lines that previously formed in the lot form in the street (not an improvement for safety or traffic flow) at a 4 way intersection. 3 lines for food going down 3 of the streets with the 4th direction hosting the condiment table featuring: various hot sauce packets, salt, pepper, sugar, salsa, jalapenos, extra butter. We had Easter candy since it was Holy Saturday.
It all goes pretty quick! Three times as fast as one line would if my math is correct. There is a little milling around after all the food is out but eventually everything is packed back up into the SUVs and trailer and brought back to the Catholic Worker house.
Most of the volunteers don’t go back to help clean up and just depart from the serving spot. I’ve always thought that this was the time that separated Catholic Workers from casual volunteers: a commitment to the un-glamourous but necessary work of cleaning up. This is no commentary on the Vegas CW volunteers in particular but a pattern I’ve noticed at CWs in other places too. It's fun to chop the veggies and then serve the food but there isn’t always time for cleaning up and an assumption that it will be taken care of by somebody.
On a certain level this makes some sense. Only so many volunteers COULD help clean at the Vegas CW because of space restrictions. You can get more folks gathered around a table to butter bread than you can around one sink for washing dishes. But when someone has that CW spirit they pitch in with the dishes and help see the project to the end, though perhaps at times feebly.
When everything was cleaned up we sat down together for a meal of leftover grits from the soup line and oatmeal baked by Julia, and it felt like family, and our bodies and our souls which had been moving since 4 that morning knew that already they’d performed a good day's work and could be content in rest for a few minutes before moving on to the next thing for the day.
And then I caught a GreyHound to Los Angeles.
Comments
Post a Comment