LAUNDRY WITH LUNCH
We often hear that many homeless people were just like the rest of us until they could no longer get by and wound up on the streets.
Juliana Padilla, who runs the front desk at the Gilroy Compassion Center, knows the truth of that better than most. “My biological father is homeless,” Padilla says. “I always think of places like this and people like my dad visiting them.”
On a recent Friday, several dozen unhoused people were coming for lunch — and laundry. Most of the center’s 40 to 50 regular clients live in tents and ramshackle shelters on the banks of a now- dry creekbed a stone’s throw from the center, which also provides showers and a range of other services, including Friday visits from a medical van.
Breakfast, often eggs with fruit and bacon, and a hot lunch — usually spaghetti with meatballs, rice and curry, or stew and noodles — are served five days a week.
While people used to be able to eat, relax and socialize indoors, coronavirus has ended that.
During mealtimes, some of the center’s clients stay in and around the parking lot to eat. Others leave, some returning to their tents.
“It’s pretty important to me in my life,” Sally Broshear, 60, says of the center, which is a short walk from her tent by the creek in an industrial-park area of Gilroy.
She lost her home more than four years ago after her husband died of cancer. Her car became her home, and then she lost her car, she says. She’s been coming to the center ever since.
“I’m getting older,” says Broshear, a former retail worker.
“I can’t get around like I used to. It’s a lot of things in one spot. The laundry’s really important.”