San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ramadan
Muslim community rallies during pandemic.
Usually, Ramadan is a busy month for Asma Ali, who normally spends every weekend with friends and family for fast breaking, or iftar, over plates of roasted dates in ghee, platters of fruit and Indian snacks, curries and desserts. This year, however, things are different.
“It’s been very solemn,” says the Redwood City resident. With the current shelterinplace order, the communal aspect of iftar seems lost.
Yet more than 90 families now sit at her family’s extended table, albeit virtually. That’s the number of families and individuals on the Peninsula receiving free hot meals to break the fast through a program Ali created with a few likeminded members of the Belmont mosque. The mosque is run by the Yaseen Foundation, a Muslim communitybased organization in San Mateo, so the group calls itself the Yaseen COVID Response Group, which also delivers free bags of groceries to families in need living in the greater Bay Area.
Through the hot meal deliveries, the group is simultaneously supporting halal restaurants that are struggling with a sharply decreased customer base.
“It’s kind of two birds with one stone,” she says. “We help the needy, but we help the vendors as well.”
The annual monthlong holiday of Ramadan began April 23 and concludes Sunday, May 24, with Eid alFitr, also known as the Festival of Breaking the Fast, in many regions celebrated with copious amounts of sweets and particularly festive dishes such as biryani in Pakistan and beef rendang in Malaysia. During this month, Muslims worldwide fast during the day and usually celebrate breaking the fast every night with communal meals, prayer and social activities at private homes, religious centers and mosques. As the shelterinplace orders in the Bay Area were extended through May, it became impossible for the community to honor regular rites and traditions.
Instead, festivities moved to the virtual sphere, says Dr Rania Awaad, clinical director at the Khalil Center, a Muslim community mental health clinic with branches in Union City, Santa Clara and Pleasanton. She has heard of people doing virtual iftars, breaking fast together through FaceTime or video conferencing, yet these are the privileged members of the community, she adds.
“It’s the folks that don’t have those options that are bearing the brunt of this,” says Awaad, also a member of the Bay Area Muslim Leadership group. There has been a surge of community members who are struggling with poverty, Awaad says. “We have seen those who don’t have even the basic necessities, let alone worry about WiFi connecting and connecting with people. They are just trying to make ends meet at this point.”
Salah Elbakri, founder of the nonprofit Support Life Foundation in Santa Clara, estimates that a high percentage of the Muslim community in the Bay Area works in the socalled gig economy. With no incoming paycheck, families struggle not only with the absence of community, but also to put food on the table.
Ali, a project manager at an international insurance company, also noticed this need in the community: “Some people might be fasting and they can’t even break their fast with a decent meal. If you’re an Uber driver or cleaner, and you’re the main breadwinner of your family, now you’ve got no money coming in through the door.”
Initially, her group at the Yaseen Foundation planned to serve food at the mosque to community members in need, as part of an annual Ramadan tradition, but quickly reorganized the system to adhere to the shelterinplace orders. Families and individuals could express their need through an online form, and volunteers and donors could get in touch through another. “One thing we noticed is that everyone wants to help,” Ali says.
Within the first few days, dozens of volunteers signed up, more than there were even families in need. This allowed the group to set up an elaborate delivery system with strict hygiene guidelines. By now, more than $60,000 has been raised for the program, supporting 92 families with 312 individuals in total.
The restaurants providing the food are located all over the Peninsula and showcase the breadth and diversity of the Muslim world: Champa in San Jose specializes in the cuisine of the Muslim Cham minority of Vietnam; Lados, a Pakistani American restaurant and food truck in Sunnyvale, serves both burgers and biryani, and Torshi is a selfdescribed Mexiterranean restaurant in San Francisco. Volunteers pick up individually packed meals from the restaurants and deliver them to the mosque, where other volunteers pack them into parcels for each family; the parcels are then delivered to the families’ doorsteps.
Support Life Foundation created a similar program for groceries. Pooling together the resources of over 40 Muslim and nonMuslim organizations in the Bay Area, it collected more than 50,000 pounds of food for its You Are Not Alone! food drive, delivering boxes of food staples and personal protective equipment to over 900 families.
“The food doesn’t make a whole meal, but it’s staples of expensive items that will feed a family for two months,” Elbakri explains. Each box contained 25 pounds of flour, 10 pounds of rice, a gallon each of olive oil and canola oil, 10 pounds of split peas and a large can of hummus or garbanzo beans, among other staples. Every box came with a handwritten card, Elbakri adds, wishing “Ramadan Mubarak” or “Blessed Ramadan”: “So you open the box and feel love.”
That seems to be almost as important as the food itself.
“Some people are affected by the virus, but everybody is affected psychologically, in one capacity or the other,” says Awaad, who has noticed a sharp rise in the inquiries for mental health support. “Normally, we might average around 10 new intakes (daily), but currently it’s something like 50.”
Despite all the struggles, Awaad believes that this unusual Ramadan has provided an opportunity for introspection and to really reconnect with the spirit of the holiday: “It has actually been really nice to see the different communities, the Muslim communities, work together, along with people who are not Muslim, too. It’s a massive communal feeling.”