Buddhist temple food pantry helping students

A food pantry run by a Buddhist temple in New York City has become a lifeline for Nepalese college students.

Inside the temple in the New York City borough of Queens, monks clad in maroon robes chanted and lit incense and candles at an altar before a golden statue of Buddha.

Earlier, on the sidewalk outside, people with face masks, shopping baskets and reusable bags stood in a socially distanced line stretching two city blocks, waiting to cart off badly needed rice, fruit and vegetables to get them through hard times due to the pandemic.

“It’s really a big help because you get all fresh, organic,” said Jyoti Rajbanshi, a Nepalese nursing student at Long Island University who has lost work and resorted to running up her credit cards and relying on the weekly pantry. “And then at least you don’t have to spend some money on buying the groceries.”

The United Sherpa Association launched the food program from scratch last April as the coronavirus was ravaging the borough and other parts of the city. The Buddhist temple and community center serves all comers, including immigrants living in the country without legal permission and the swollen ranks of the unemployed, but it has become a particularly important lifeline for Nepalese college students living thousands of miles from their families.

Some were forced by lockdowns to leave dorms where previously they got most of their meals. They don’t qualify for federal stimulus checks. Their student visas generally don’t allow them to work full-time or off-campus to support themselves. And there’s often little help from home, with families in their heavily tourismdependent

country strug- gling mightily during the

pandemic.

“They don’t have unemployment insurance. They don’t have homes here. They are far away from home,” said Urgen Sherpa, the association’s president, who calls the students it helps “unknown victims” of the coronavirus.

They’re part of the estimated 2 million residents of New York City facing food insecurity, a number said to have nearly doubled amid the biggest surge in unemployment since the Great Depression.

Early on in the pandemic, residents of the immigrantrich Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Corona neighborhoods of Queens were hit hard and tested positive for the virus in greater numbers than in other parts of the city.

JESSIE WARDARSKI — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Lama Ngawang Yonten and other Buddhist members of the United Sherpa Association prepare for the Dakini Day practice, a group meditation that includes song and food and is celebrated on the 25th day of each lunar month, at their community temple in the Queens borough of New York on Jan. 8.