Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Dignity in dining at one local soup kitchen
By Ashley Mouldon
Metal spoons banged on the sides of large silver colanders on the two stoves inside a small kitchen. Just behind a rickety door where a sign hangs above, with the words, “Dignity Diner,” this half-kitchen, half-children’s-playroom is where all the magic happens.
“How many cups are in a quart?” asked one.
“Who will make the corn bread?” asked another.
“Can you do the pudding?”
“Fifty people, that’s right,” another volunteer said, answering perhaps the most important question.
Such is the chatter of a typical late-Tuesday afternoon amid the commotion that sometimes seems chaotic among volunteers at Holy Covenant United Methodist Church, at 925 W. Diversey Parkway.
Buzzing to and from the kitchen to the open dining room, the cooks, one recent evening, swiftly prepared supper where every Tuesday night, the church’s sanctuary turns into an informal dining room, known here as the Dignity Diner.
Dignity Diner was founded in 1992 to serve the area’s homeless and other residents of the community. Today, the majority of its patrons are homeless, or live in the nearby Lincoln Park Shelter. The guests receive a meal and every other week can participate in activities such as art projects, talent shows and music events held at the church.
Sprawling about the room, the volunteers serve their guests rather than the guests helping themselves, thus the name, Dignity Diner.
On a recent Tuesday, at the front of the makeshift diner, sat a cheerful woman, writing down the names of the people who had come. Her name is Kara Teeple, Dignity Diner’s coordinator. She has worked at the diner for 11 years.
Tonight is like all the others: Teeple helps prepare the food in the kitchen, this time the rice. Then as usual, she took her perch at a small table and chair near the entrance to the church. She has a faded piece of white construction paper and a black ball-point pen, taking her time to make sure she gets the spelling of everyone’s name correct as they enter. At her side is her dog, a Sheppard-mix.
Every so often, one of the guests makes his or her way over to Teeple’s friendly pet to say, ‘hello.’
“I love the community feeling and fostering the sense of family,” said Teeple as she smiled and nodded at one of the regular dinner guests who walked in from the rain.
Teeple has a welcoming nature about her, always taking a moment to chat or tell someone ‘yes, she has walked her dog today.’
Over the past few years, the program has struggled with financing the dinners.
“We have to rely mainly on grants, but lately it’s been more of private donations,” Teeple said.
And yet, for the last 17 years, they have somehow managed.
On that winter’s night, six cooks stood around the stove, checking every couple of minutes on the simmering food. One poured herself a cup of coffee, looking as if she craved the caffeine.
On the menu, for starters, are bagels from Einstein Bagels and a syrupy fruit cocktail. For the main course: vegetarian egg rolls, fried rice, and corn bread and for dessert thick chocolate pudding.
Hovering over the stove, the volunteers stirred rice and piled eggrolls onto large metal sheet pans and put them into the ovens. By then, the fruit cocktail and bagels had already made themselves upstairs to the guests. The cornbread was the last to be made, but seemed to be the most difficult for the chefs to master.
“How much cornbread?” asked one.
“Do we have enough room?” asked another.
“Who has a Blackberry we can use to find the measurements,” someone asked. “I did that once.”
Once the cornbread made its way into the oven, the group of volunteers carried the food up the winding staircase to the dinner guests above, where various sized tables and chairs filled the space inside the makeshift dining hall. Towards the back of the room, two tables were covered with plastic plates.
Meanwhile, Teeple signed in another guest, a man named Troy who happens to be a Dignity Diner patron of three years. Dressed in a black knitted hat and black jacket, traces of a younger Navy veteran can be seen in his eyes.
Troy heartily laughed, bragged about his two girlfriends all the while asking Teeple if she had walked her dog this evening.
“What keeps me coming back is the socialization,” he said, swaying back and forth. “There’s good people here.”
Troy said he was referred to the diner by a friend he knew living on the streets. He first came for a hot dinner, but said he soon discovered he liked socializing with other people over dinner rather than on the sidewalk.
After a few minutes of catch-up with Teeple, Troy walked away, saying goodbye and headed over to the food table for a cup of pudding.
By then, the last trickle of the crowd into the dinner had stopped and guests had started to leave. Sitting by herself was a woman with young-looking skin, sipping from a cup of coffee.
Her name is Cheryl Almgren. She is a Dignity Diner veteran of eight years.
“I started coming here after my father died in August 2001,” Almgren said, dressed in a lilac purple overcoat with a matching shirt peeping through. Her maroon- colored pants hid her prosthetic leg and the foot she wears.
“See, I am disabled,” she said. “I have a sort of mental illness. But the art projects we do really help me,” added Almgren.
Almgren says she enjoys coming to the diner because it offers a sense of community. She comes every Tuesday night and looks forward, mostly, to the various art projects that the diner facilitates.
“I really like photographing tulips. There is something really calming about art,” Almgren said, then asked for more coffee.
As Almgren sipped a fresh cup, Linda Fetzer, a member of the host church, walked up. Fetzer has been a volunteer for a year and half.
“I do it because I love it,” she said.
Soon Fetzer retreated back to the basement kitchen, where washing of the dishes had already begun. Not long after, the dinner guests upstairs had all left, leaving only a few volunteers like Alex Johnson, who was busy picking up leftovers.
“It’s exciting,” said Johnson, a volunteer at Dignity Diner for three years. “I go to sleep happy every night,” said Johnson, adding that he believes it’s his duty to give back to the city and that the diner has been the place for him to do so.
“I will always keep volunteering for as long as I’m in the city.”
Posted by John W. Fountain at 3:30 PM
10/31/2007 10:00:00 PM
Samuel Morris tells his story of living homeless in Chicago last month at the Green Lantern art gallery in Wicker Park.
Looking Through the Window
By JON SONNHEIM
Medill News Service
He walked through the door of the Green Lantern art gallery in Wicker Park with a slight swagger, the kind of gait usually associated with a man who knows something others don't.
But Samuel Morris' slumping shoulders and hooded eyes made him appear increasingly worn-down and tired, belying his 45 years and well-dressed outward appearance. A leather cap worn backwards, a colorful sweater and olive-green slacks would have allowed Morris to blend in with any of the middle-class guests at the art gallery.
But there was something else he was wearing, a recent addition to his wardrobe. Samuel Morris, a former homeless prostitute living with AIDS, now wore a smile.
"Lived on the streets three years, six months, nine days exactly," said Morris, who started receiving proper medical attention and housing in September. "For the first time in years, I was content. I was happy. I knew I was safe."
Morris appeared at the Green Lantern to give his oral history-to tell others that bad circumstances aren't synonymous with bad people. His presentation was part of a show highlighting artwork by the homeless, but Morris admits there was nothing beautiful about his former life.
"My family died, and I was there [in Michigan] by myself," he said. "I was like 13, 14 years old," Morris said. "I ended up putting names of cities into a hat, and Chicago came out first."
A lonely teenager in a strange city, Morris said he found part-time work and graduated from high school-but not without running into the evils of the streets. From age 16 to 20, Morris said, he became addicted to cocaine, and began stripping and prostituting himself to both sexes in order to make money.
"In Samuel's case, I think he went where he felt there were opportunities," said Jessica Maiorca of the MGR Foundation, who has worked with Morris since May. "When he felt desperate, he went to prostitution, because there was nothing else to do."
That lifestyle caught up with him in his early 30s, said Morris, when he discovered he'd contracted AIDS.
"Suicide," Morris said with a laugh. "Which I tried four times, suicide. I couldn't deal with it. Being sick, no insurance, nobody to turn to. I couldn't get no help. I mean, what would you do?"
Morris turned to the streets, sleeping where he could, watching his back and panhandling for food. His story is not so different from that of thousands of others who, as Morris said, are "a paycheck [from] the streets."
While city officials estimate that roughly 6,000 people live on Chicago streets, homeless advocates put the number closer to 21,000.
Kara Teeple sees at least 50 of those people every week. As director of the Dignity Diner, a vegetarian restaurant-style meal program in Lakeview for the homeless and hungry, Teeple and groups of volunteers greet, seat and serve their guests with dignity, compassion and respect.
"To see people come in," Teeple said, "just the tears in their eyes. It's like your sense of inequality or equality just goes out the window. Everyone here is equal."
Every Tuesday night since 1992, guests at the Dignity Diner are treated to table-clothed meals, often accompanied by live music or a show. It's a chance for guests to enjoy a sense of community and normalcy, if for only a few hours.
That's why MGR Foundation volunteers come to the diner every third Tuesday to work on art projects with the willing guests. Guests who, according to Morris, are so much more than faceless panhandlers off the streets.
"Lot of them guys out there [are not all] crack-heads and alcoholics," Morris said. "Lot of us have talent, play the piano, can draw, can sing, drama, poems. Quit judging people-just listen."
One year ago, Samuel Morris said he was supposed to have been dead. Yet there he was, surrounded by the work of homeless artists at the Green Lantern, absorbing their smiles and breathing in life.
"I've known Samuel since May," Maiorca said. "He's happier now. He just seems like his heart is lighter, and he definitely has a purpose in life. He's got more work to do."
In the past few months, Morris said, everything in his life has begun falling into place. With the help of volunteers, he pooled his disability funds, finding housing and proper medical attention. Now the man who once had nothing is giving back.
"I'm still full-blown [AIDS], but I'm dealing with it," Morris said. "I have guys come over that are homeless, let them get a bath, wash their clothes. I ain't never going to forget where I came from and what I went through."
Perhaps that's why Morris walks with that slight swagger----because he knows something other people don't. Samuel Morris knows what the other side of life looks like.
"I'm out [of] the streets," Morris laughed. "I'm inside looking out this time, not outside looking in. And I like that."
