THANKFUL FOR NOT BEING FORGOTTEN
Jimenez event ensures people can enjoy the holiday
Maria Hernandez, 37, heard a light tapping on her door Thursdaymorning andopened it to find Kelly Delgado, a stranger, holding a blue tote bag of warm Thanksgiving meals.
“Thank you so much,” Hernandez gushed, taking the tote inside.
This year, Hernandez, her husband and her son were relying on meals from the Raul Jimenez Thanksgiving Dinner for the first time.
Her husband, a cook, and she, a waitress, were out of work for three months due to the pandemic. Even now, they don’t work enough hours to make ends meet.
As business screeched to a halt, their bills mounted, and the family members barely are scraping by.
“It’s been very hard,” her husband, Miguel Lopez Garcia, 46, said in Spanish. “The pandemic changed our lives so much.”
It also changed the 41st Jimenez dinner, a festive event that in previous years has served 25,000 people at the Convention Center, made possible by thousands of volunteers cooking the food, setting up the hall and serving on the big day.
But this year, there was no group dinner for the vulnerable, lonely and food-insecure on Thanksgiving Day. To avoid the risk of spreading the coronavirus, meals were boxed up to go and
delivered around the city.
About 250 volunteers came together this year, instead of the usual 4,000. And instead of hundreds of volunteers working in the kitchen, 10 chefs from the RK Group, who got tested for the coronavirus beforehand, produced an incredible 10,000 meals in only five days.
The Raul Jimenez volunteers delivered the meals directly to homes or to more than 30 nonprofits that in turn delivered to the elderly, homeless or otherwise vulnerable residents they serve.
“We had to come to the realization it was going to have to be different, so then it was like ‘OK, howdowe still complete our mission?’” said Raul Jimenez III, whose grandfather, a restaurateur, founded the event in San Antonio in 1979. “And now look. It’s just been a phenomenal event. Yes, it’s not 25,000 people, but we’re doing what we can to show peoplewe care. To say ‘You’re not forgotten.’”
Delgado, the volunteer, was introduced to the dinner last year through her children’s Boy Scouts program. She saw what good it did, and what an important lesson it brought to her kids. She knew that this year, she’d be signing up again.
She and dozens of other volunteers pulled up in a long line of cars Thursday morning. As they rolled up to the Convention Center loading dock, a handful of volunteers checked Delgado’s list of homes and piled in the right number of warm meals, bags of popcorn and handmade notes from elementary school children wishing the residents a Happy Thanksgiving.
“I hope you have a great Thanksgiving. If you have any trouble I pray for you,” wrote one child. “Loveyoustayhealthyfeelsafe” wrote another, words scrunched together. In a third letter, a child had written a Christmas list with no mention of Thanksgiving (a volunteer quickly removed it and replaced it with another).
Once Delgado got what she needed, she rode off to five homes near the Medical Center to
personally deliver meals. Some residents asked her to leave the meals by the door to avoid contact. Others welcomed her into their homes.
“For me, what I try to instill in my kids is a level of community responsibility. We talk a lot about individual responsibility in the house, since I’m raising teenagers,” said Delgado, a Northside ISD substitute teacher. “But especially with the global pandemic, we really need to reinforce it’s not about one person — it’s about the community as a whole.”
Lopez Garcia and Hernandez thanked Delgado and her 12-yearold son, who was helping her deliver meals, for their volunteer work.
“Thank you for everything you’re doing,” Hernandez told her. “Maybe next year, if things are better for us, we’ll do the same.”