San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A VOLUNTEER’S GIVE & TAKE
I like to work in a shared kitchen, so when I read in The Chronicle that in response to the pandemic, Food Runners was cooking in the Haight, my neighborhood, I pondered volunteering.
Chefs were preparing large quantities of meals that needed to be divided into portions and packaged for delivery to shelters, community centers, residential facilities and other places where people couldn’t cook for themselves.
Walking on Waller Street a few days after I read about the need, I passed the old Hamilton United Methodist Church, which is now the Waller Center, a facility under the Methodist umbrella, available for retreats and communitybuilding activities.
The parking lot gates were open, and a large refrigerated truck was parked next to one wall. The building door was open, and I stepped inside.
I was supposed to be volunteering to play with the kids; they were actually volunteering to play with me, a mother in need of a touch.
My oldest son was about a year old when I first walked through that door 46 years ago. Hamilton Church, which then housed the Earl Paltenghi Youth Center, was the site of weekly “child observation,” gatherings. Parents (in fact, all women) gathered with their toddlers; the kids played, the adults talked.
The building was decrepit, the kitchen, where we prepared the coffee and plated the snacks, gloomy. The mothers discussed their problems (“He’s still not sleeping through the night”), watched the kids interacting and debated whether one kid knocking down the block tower built by another qualified as creative play (he’s an iconoclast) or destructive behavior (he’ll wind up in prison).
Eventually, all the kids walked, got potty trained and slept through the night. Hamilton was a farm for growing friendships; a few years ago, I attended the wedding of one of those toddlers.
In the ’80s, career under way, I was assigned by Merian, a German travel magazine that focused every issue on one destination, to write about the Haight as part of its San Francisco issue. By that time, Hamilton Methodist Church housed the HaightAshbury Food Program, which provided hot meals and some job training.
My story contrasted the beginnings of gentrification with the despair of street people sleeping in doorways and eating lunch at Hamilton.
After the story was accepted, an experienced photographer from an international photo agency walked around the neighborhood with me, an assortment of fancy cameras slung from straps around his neck. He was eager to see Hamilton.
We arrived there shortly before lunch, for which a line of people outside was waiting. With no introductions to staff and no authorization, the photographer started snapping pictures of those waiting. Many objected, covering their faces, trying to shoo him away, then cursing at him. Shutter clicking, he went about his job, treating his subjects like gnats.
I was embarrassed, but I did nothing. That guy’s tough, a real professional, I thought as we left.
By the mid ’90s, our two sons were out of the house, and anyway long past the age when they cuddled with their mama. I was feeling needy. A friend mentioned that as a volunteer at the Hamilton Family Center, the city’s first emergency family shelter, she played with the kids.
I went one evening a week, arriving in time to help serve dinner, carrying trays of food from the kitchen to mothers and kids waiting for their meals. Adjacent to the dining room and kitchen was a dormitory, where bunk beds crowded together, creating sleeping spaces that would make today’s streetside tents look spacious. Mothers and children were crammed together, clothing stuffed between the bed frames and the mattresses. A few families watched small TV sets wedged into the edges of their bunks. The smell of the place, once that of old soup, was now the smell of human bodies.
After dinner was over and the tables cleared, there were craft projects, and we would sit with the kids and help them with glue and paint, drawing butterflies, pasting glitter and feathers to paper. When those works were set out to dry, I’d ascend a dark and rickety staircase to the gym, the nighttime area for runningaround play.
I sat on the floor one day while a bunch of little girls untied my hair and tied it up again, fussing with a braid here, a pigtail there. I was supposed to be volunteering to play with the kids; they were actually volunteering to play with me, a mother in need of a touch.
A few weeks ago, when I walked inside the open door I’d walked through before, a woman greeted me and I told her I was thinking of volunteering. She told me about the shifts, about how to sign up, what would be required.
There were lines of workers in blue plastic gloves, some in aprons, all with masks, standing 6 feet apart, doling out heaping portions of a sausage and rice dish into plastic containers. Down the row, another volunteer snapped plastic lids onto the containers, then counted the numbers of containers that filled each carton.
The first time I went, I wore a name tag. I didn’t need it to fit in. Nobody asked about my experience, my qualifications. I served a purpose, and that felt like more than enough.
Hamilton United Methodist closed as a place of worship in 2008, but its purpose — in the life of the city and the neighborhood, as well as the life of an ordinary San Franciscan — continues in this crisis. People worship in all sorts of ways.