For AIDS Patients, Project Angel Food Is Heaven-Sent

Bert Dawes was once a hammer-slinging, free-lance carpenter who visited the mountains with his dog, Rocky. Dawes is now confined to his Hollywood apartment when he’s not in the hospital. Sometimes he’s too weak to walk to the kitchen to make something to eat. Dawes, 27, has AIDS.

Fortunately, he has found some help. A volunteer from Project Angel Food, a West Hollywood-based program, brings Dawes a free hot meal at noon Monday through Friday. He is one of about 80 patients with acquired immune deficiency syndrome confined to home who are helped by the program, said Administrative Director Robert Ledwon.

“A lot of the clients are very, very sick,” Ledwon said. “Many are too sick to go shopping or to cook for themselves. Some have families to take care of them, but many are alone.” Dawes is one of the latter.

“If it wasn’t for Angel Food, it would just be another frozen burrito,” Dawes said, as he munched on a cookie from an earlier meal delivery. The thin, hollow-cheeked man smiled and added: “That one square keeps me healthy.”

Volunteers prepare about 1,600 meals a month in the rented kitchen of Crescent Heights United Methodist Church in West Hollywood. One recent Friday, 77 meals were delivered to patients scattered throughout Los Angeles. The menu included Swiss steak with noodles, spinach salad and strawberry shortcake.

“We try to make the meals homey and tasty,” said Guy Blume, an interior designer who moonlights as the program’s volunteer chef.

At 9 a.m., Blume and about a dozen kitchen volunteers begin arriving at the church and are soon chopping up salad, cooking noodles and packing the meals into aluminum containers. Some of the containers are marked to show they are specially prepared for clients who don’t eat meat or have other dietary restrictions.

About a dozen people who serve as drivers arrive about 11 a.m., greeting each other with hugs and helping to sort the lunches into brown bags designated for different parts of the city. Before the drivers set out, armed with lists of names and addresses, they join hands in a circle with the kitchen workers and bow their heads in prayer.

“We’d just like to say thank you for all the angels here today,” one man said, producing smiles all around.

After the drivers leave, another shift of volunteers cleans up the kitchen and begins preparation for the next day’s meals. Sometimes their work extends into the afternoon.

Project Angel Food was started last September by Marianne Williams, the leader of a local religious group, as part of the now-defunct Los Angeles Center for Living, a drop-in support center for people with long-term illnesses. Many of the 180 volunteers belong to Williams’ group.

The program operates on a monthly budget of $15,000, most of it from private contributions, and is patterned after two similar but larger organizations, God’s Love We Deliver in New York City and Project Open Hand in San Francisco.

The larger of these two, the $2.6-million Project Open Hand, was started in 1987, and last year served 800 home-confined and impoverished AIDS patients daily, according to director of development Skip Sikora.

All three organizations cater to AIDS patients who don’t qualify for other community programs, like Meals on Wheels, that deliver meals to invalids at home.

Most of Project Angel Food’s clients find out about the service through word-of-mouth networking or AIDS patient support organizations, such as AIDS Project Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, Project Angel Food is the only program of its kind that is designed specifically for AIDS patients, said Jack Cotter, Necessities of Life program manager for AIDS Project Los Angeles.

“Los Angeles, unfortunately, is very under the ball as far as awareness of the problem of the number of people who have AIDS in this city, who are dying at home, who have nothing to eat and no one to care for them at all,” Ledwon said.