Meals create community for homeless
women
By IAN JONES
Washington
Its the best thing since sliced bread. Its
better than going home, said Connie Teddie Flemmings, sitting
with relatives around a table in the warm and bustling First Congregational
United Church of Christ basement in downtown Washington. She was referring to
the air filled with the smell of fried chicken and with the voices of women and
children enjoying a hot Sunday dinner after a heated game of bingo.
The 22-year-olds quip carries extra weight here. Like most
of the women and families who gather at the Dinner Program for Homeless Women,
she has no home to go to when the meal is over on a frigid January night.
Tonights gathering with friend Yvonne Gillis, cousin Donita Covington and
her three children was the closest thing to home Flemmings would experience
that week.
Highlight of the week
Two blocks east, latest-model SUVs search for parking in the newly
gentrified neighborhood around Washingtons MCI Center sports arena. But
here, three hours of bingo, dinner and companionship on a Sunday night are the
highlight of a week of struggle for 80 women and children. Six days a week, the
nonprofit program offers breakfast for nearly 300 homeless people. Each
weeknight, 75 to 90 homeless women and children come for dinner.
In addition to dinner, the center doles out toiletries, telephone
use, legal assistance, employment training, housing assistance, case
management, even a computer workshop. Husbands and boyfriends wait outside --
the women say they feel bad for them, but the city offers many more feeding
options for men than for women and children.
Dinner Program is great because they give us emotional
support, clothes, Band-Aids and items for our personal needs. Women have a lot
of personal needs, Flemmings laughed while 2-year-old Dominic Covington
napped in her lap. Ronald, 10, and Corey, 3, picked quietly at the last of the
green beans and mashed potatoes on their plates.
Its a good place for kids if some people would learn
how to act, said their mother, Donita Covington, Flemmings cousin.
Some of the actions of these women are not good role models for the
children. But its a good place. Tonight at the bingo table they had
prizes for the children. Everybody got a gift.
The foods OK, said Donna Young, a soft-spoken
20-year-old who lives in a shelter on Massachusetts Avenue. She is working on
her high school equivalency diploma, answering the phones at Papa Johns
Pizza and trying to get her year-old son, James, out of foster care.
It is hard for the homeless to focus. It can take them a
whole day to do one thing. So this is a respite. Its only for women.
Its a community center, said Paula Dyan, who has worked as a case
manager here for the past eight months.
The 23-year-old Dinner Program for Homeless Women, with the slogan
Building Community One Meal at a Time, does have the feel of a
community center. Staff and visitors have an easy relationship, though
occasional reprimands were made for harsh words or a rising noise level as the
nights last bingo game, with its much-coveted $5 cash prize, drew to a
close. On this night, someone vandalized cars in the churchs parking lot
with nail polish. Nevertheless, its the women here that keep the
programs executive director, Kier Maxwell, coming back. In other words,
its community.
Complex puzzle of poverty
I think this program is crucial. For places to eat in the
evening, theres not many other choices, said Maxwell, a young
African-American woman currently completing her doctorate in marriage and
family therapy. Weve been here since 1979 -- thats part of
our track record of showing the need. Jointly, with Zacchaeus Kitchens
breakfast program, we served 94,000 meals last year. So the need is
there.
For the women at dinner tonight, hunger is only one piece of a
complex puzzle of poverty that can include domestic violence, drug abuse,
mental illness or lack of affordable housing, Maxwell said.
There needs to be more. Not so much food, but there is no
place for these women to be, she said. They might be working at
McDonalds but they cant afford D.C. housing. We need more
affordable housing.
Flemmings, who has been homeless for about a year, slept under the
Union Labor Lights Building, home to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service, for five months. Then she moved to the Open Door Shelter for Women, a
collection of dilapidated trailers built as emergency shelter by the city more
than a decade ago. About 70 percent of the women at dinner tonight make the
11-block walk -- or, in winter, take the programs van -- back to that
shelter after dinner.
Flemmings has her own ideas about whats needed. The
Dinner Program is a lot of help for the ones having a hard time right now.
Its really not easy to be in the shelter. Its not easy to come down
to the dinner program because a lot of people dont want to swallow their
pride, she said. But I always say, hey, sometimes you got to do
what you got to do to survive, even if you have to swallow your
pride.
On this bitter winter evening, swallowing some hot fried chicken
and green beans with mashed potatoes and gravy didnt hurt either.
Ian Jones is a freelance writer living in Washington.
National Catholic Reporter, February 15,
2002
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