Guadalupe Homeless Project (GHP) Breakfast

Preparing and serving breakfast to the homeless men of GHP is one of the many ways we are serving the community this week.  Taking shifts, today Amy, Makayla, and I awoke around 3:45 am to arrive at the kitchen by 4 am.  Just three floors below where we were soundly asleep, the kitchen was lively with an energetic woman named Navidad and latin music playing in the background.  We were awake in no time.

We watched as this happy woman weaved around the kitchen and took guesses at what she was preparing.  She admitted to speaking little English but fortunately she spoke English well enough to tell us about her children, husband, job, and life here.  Words she didn’t know she animatedly thought out loud in Spanish until she came to a similar word in English.  The conversation was therefore choppy but delightful.

Breakfast was prepared around 5:30: coffee, rice, hamburger with stewed tomatoes and potatoes, an excellent chili and garlic sauce, and day old bread from the Homeboy bakery.  At 5:30 the men arrived, 33 in all.  They gathered in the hall to say a morning prayer before their meal.  We joined them to pray.  “It was short today”, one of the men commented.  Then we helped serve their plates.  After they all were seated with their food and coffee we grabbed a small plate to taste what we made and sat with some of the men.  They were very warm.  Navidad introduced us to them as volunteers from Montana after we were seated and they applauded us.  After we finished we decided to go around and shake every man’s hand, wishing them a good day.  One man, who looked a lot like my grandpa Esteves, now deceased, kissed our hand.  We felt elated interacting with them.  Some of us were pushed out of our comfort zones.  Some of us were more comfortable than we would have thought.  The real lesson for me is these men are all people we know.  I see God in all of them.

-Natasha Leidholt