The power of a single guy with a good heart

So many uproars to write about, so little time.

There was another Twitter meltdown over something Jeff Flake said and another social media melee over something Meghan McCain said.

The Phoenix police union “liked” some questionable comment on Facebook and the Republicans disliked a gay pride flag that Secretary of State Katie Hobbs hung on the state Capitol. And me?

I decided to chuck it all and go see Alexi De Villiers, who early on Sunday morning was cooking chowder for 100 strangers.

De Villiers is one of those people who are all over Arizona. You just don’t often hear about them.

He isn’t part of a church group. He doesn’t run a non-profit group or well, any group.

He’s just a guy who once a week feeds 100 people who live on the streets of Phoenix.

Not because he can. In fact, he probably shouldn’t. He’s an artist, after all, and he, his wife and 5-year-old son aren’t exactly living the high life.

No, he’s doing it because his faith, his conscience and his heart require it. “I just have to do this,” he told me. De Villiers, 53, grew up in south Florida, the son of Cuban immigrants. He was one of five kids yet the family always had enough to eat and always shared what they had with others.

So it was natural when he grew up and had a family of his own in Tempe that he and his wife, Denise, would share what they had, first with the neighbors and later with others.

A decade or so ago, they began packing up their leftovers and taking them to nearby Escalante Park once a week. That first week, they fed 12 people. Within a few weeks, they were bringing platters of beans and rice and pork to the park, enough to feed 70.

Eventually, they began handing out meals along Van Buren.

One week, in 2010, De Villiers had 20 lunches left over after making his street run. So when he and his wife spotted a group of older people congregated outside a building at 10th Avenue and Jefferson, he began passing out the food that was left.

“Then the door opened and somebody said, ‘Hey, there’s food out here.’ Inside were 80 people,” De Villiers recalled. “I said ‘Holy cow, we’ll be back next week.' "

The next week they took 100 hot meals to that building, which houses Justa Center, a privately-funded nonprofit day center that serves homeless people 55 years and older.

Eventually, De Villiers became a one-man show after the couple's son, Adonis, was born. There is a certain symmetry to his work. He funds his meals from his artwork, which in turn is fueled by his meals.

He takes the empty food cans, along with other recycled materials, and transforms them into robots and lamps and other whimsical sculptures. (A couple of them are displayed in the Phoenix Children’s Museum.)

He sells them in galleries and at street fairs and festivals and over the internet, often building robots that resemble super heroes or fans of particular sports teams. Then he uses a portion of what he earns to feed the homeless.

Summertime is slow in the art business so he mostly relies on donations to buy food this time of year. It costs about $160 a week to provide 100 to 120 meals.

“People just donate,” he said. “They see what I do.”

What he does is offer a hot lunch to homeless seniors who otherwise might not eat.

The Salvation Army provides lunches during the week at Justa Center, through its Meals on Wheels program. Most Sundays, a church group will offer a sermon and a serving of food.

But on Saturdays, they rely on De Villiers.

“It makes a lot of difference to get a hot meal,” Frank Montenegro, who has been homeless for four months, told me as he lined up to help carry the food inside.

On this day — a rare Sunday this particular week because a church group wanted the Saturday slot — De Villiers is serving up chowder, thick with chunks of ham and potato, nicely peppered. He got up at 5 a.m. to make it, having spent a few hours doing all the chopping the day before. Along with the chowder, he offers bread, apricots and cookies freshly baked by Susan, another unsung citizen who each week supplies something sweet.

He also has brought along big tins of lemonade mix and a few dozen hygiene packs containing soap and toothpaste and such, donated by the Tempe Rotary Club.

“He’s the guy,” said Mike Krause, who has worked at Justa Center for three years. “People ask what’s for lunch and I tell them Alexi’s doing lunch and people clap. He absolutely is making a difference." De Villiers will feed 5,000 people this year, not through an abundance of money but because of an abundance of heart.

“I know that when I give and do it all comes back to me tenfold,” he said.

If you’d like to know more about De Villiers, check out his website, alexide villiers.com, or email him at fish liptz@yahoo.com. If you’d like to help with a donation, go to Alexidevil liers@mail.com on PayPal.

The money isn’t tax deductible because De Villiers isn’t registered as a non-profit. There is no bureaucracy here, no paperwork or overhead or any structure of any sort.

Just a guy with a good heart.