Skid Row Project Is Lesson in Awareness

About 200 Los Angeles County employees met the downtown homeless Sunday in a Skid Row back street decorated with multicolored plastic pennants and banners emblazoned with the event’s logo, “Friends Feeding Friends.”

For the hundreds of street people who lined the street for a free meal in the festive outdoor setting, the fried chicken served with beans and rice was a welcome break from their everyday fare at downtown soup kitchens.

For the county volunteers, who organized the noontime meal distribution in cooperation with the Los Angeles Brotherhood Crusade, it offered a dose of reality.

“It’s devastating to see people in so much need,” said Juanita Patterson, a county hospital community health worker who said this was her first contact with the street people. “I feel I could burst into tears, but that’s not going to help nothing.”

2,500 Meals

Instead, Patterson and other volunteers continued dishing out the food on paper plates.

The county volunteers served an estimated 2,500 meals, paid for by the Brotherhood Crusade, a philanthropic organization based in South-Central Los Angeles that calls itself the Black United Way.

A crusade spokeswoman noted that county workers are the largest single contributors to the organization, donating about $500,000 a year.

Evelyn Gutierrez, of the county’s Special Programs Division, which coordinates the employees’ charitable activities, said the volunteers agreed to participate Sunday “to show we care” and to “build awareness and sensitivity” to the problems of the homeless, estimated to number about 15,000 in the downtown area alone.

The noontime exchange also served to change preconceptions among some volunteers who commented on the courtesy they encountered from the street people.

Pamfila Camangian, who works in the finance division of the county’s Social Services Department, said she had expected to run into some “rough” characters, because her main impression of downtown street people came from those she had seen “drunk or lying in the streets.”

“But everything has gone very smoothly,” she said. “People have been very cooperative.”

Some of the homeless noted that they often have to stand in long, slow lines--with occasional shoving matches and altercations--for meals. They expressed pleasant surprise at the well-organized food distribution, with only a few minutes wait for service.

“This is great,” said Ron Sheehy, 46, savoring his meal at a row of folding tables that lined a block of Winston Street.

Sheehy said that although “no one starves down here anymore” because of various agencies that provide daily meals for the area’s needy, the fried chicken was “an unusual treat.”

‘Here Every Day’

Yamaham Lawrence, 27, who said he’s been “hanging out” in the downtown area for about a year, also liked the food. But he had a question: “Why only once a year? We got homeless people here every day.”

In a little more than an hour, most of the food was gone. A few stragglers were grateful for a plateful of the beans and white rice, all that remained toward the end.

“This is the heartbreaking part,” said Fay Lewis, as she scraped the bottom of food containers. Lewis, who works at the Sheriff’s Department’s Altadena substation, said she volunteered because “I could be in their shoes someday.”

“The sadness here is that this is just one of 365 days out of the year,” said Steve Marcus, 36, a deputy district attorney. “It’s nice to pat yourself on the back. But when we leave, it’s just another day down here.”