The Foreign Service Journal, April 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2021 51 I realized there was a greater need than I knew, so I quickly returned to the church and asked for 20 more meals. When I returned, the older gentleman to whom I had given the first meal thanked me and told me he hadn’t had food in his hotel room in two weeks. A group used to bring meal vouchers weekly, he said, but when the coronavirus started spreading and restaurants closed, they just stopped coming. “I’ll get food together and be back next Saturday,” I told him. I didn’t even ask his name and room number, I just figured I would find him, sitting outside I suppose. The next week I used the Nextdoor app again, and my neigh- bors responded generously. I made six boxes full of canned and packaged food to take to the hotel. I wasn’t quite sure who they were all for, but I knew the first family and the two gentle- men, and I figured there would be at least three other people in need. I just had to find them. Once the food boxes were in my car, I collected 30 cooked meals from the church and delivered everything to the original family and the two older men, a single mother with two kids and two more elderly men—hoping that it would last through the week. At first I didn’t have a set time, or much structure. But after the second week, I told them I would be back weekly at the same time. I said I’d come with food until COVID-19 ended and every- thing was back to normal. I wanted them to use the food and to know I was not going to disappear. I am not sure if they believed me, some random person who just showed up on Saturdays. They didn’t even know my name, and honestly, I didn’t know theirs—just their room numbers. At week four I realized my neighbors wouldn’t be able to sup- port me over the long term with food donations. I called it the “Quarantine Slump”—at that point none of us knew how long this would last; we just hoped it would end soon. How It’s Going I started posting on Facebook and reaching out to nonprof- its and the food banks. One co-founder at a local nonprofit, Tri-County Veterans Services Network, introduced me to the founder of Project Street Outreach, where I could get bread and food boxes. Later, I began picking up food donations from a medical clinic that had transitioned to a food bank with the onset of COVID-19. I have received unexpected donations from grocery stores and from people in different neighborhoods. Some days I find food on my porch late in the evening. I never really know where help or food will come from or who will bring it, but it comes. One woman donated all the meat from her freezer when she became a vegan. Early on, a college friend who owns a local diner gave me dozens of local eggs because he had to shut down his restaurant due to COVID-19. Sometime in the first few weeks my numbers jumped from six boxes to 13, and now I am at 19 boxes, all delivered to families and individuals living at the motel under various government assistance programs. The majority (14) are veterans, some with families, who depend on the joint U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development–U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs supportive housing program for homeless vets. There are also a couple of disabled elderly men who are not vets and three women who rely on disability benefits. Since December, I have been bringing extra boxes of food to make sure I have enough for anyone who needs it. Each week volunteers and I bring food to 25 to 30 residents in this hotel. Their need for support has not diminished during the past year; rather, it has grown as COVID-19 persists and food shortages become more apparent. My process starts on Monday and ends on Saturday, and then starts again. Every week I go to four different stores on Wednesday and Thursday (by now I know the cheapest place for most basic food items). Three volunteers help me make boxes on Friday. For the first six or seven weeks, I made the deliveries on my own on Saturday, but then ran out of space in my car and couldn’t handle the volume alone. Now three to five volunteers help with the deliveries each week. March 6 marked the one-year anniversary of my first food delivery. But the project is about so much more. It is about real- izing that when you make yourself available to the world, every- thing lines up. In week 11 the church stopped making cooked meals, and I was sad that I would not be able to take those; but by the following Monday I had received a Facebook message from a stranger asking if I would like soup. She put me in touch with a volunteer who happens to live five minutes away and had been preparing six gallons of soup weekly since COVID-19 started and asked if I could use it. I now deliver 30-40 quarts of soup weekly. Another lovely neighbor bakes homemade pastries that she delivers tome every Friday. When I was starting to give up on find- ing fridge space, a friend who has helpedme for months donated a full-size refrigerator for my garage, and that solved the problem. I never really knowwhere help or food will come fromor who will bring it, but it comes.