Day of Helping: Patrons and Protesters

It’s 9 a.m. and the Lawndale Civic Center is alive with the promise of a new day.

Shop owners have rolled up their shades, a hairdresser is blowing out the curls of a beauty salon’s first client and City Hall workers are already on their second cup of coffee.

The soup kitchen at House of Yahweh is still an hour from opening its door, but inside, two of the agency’s 100 or so volunteers are busy chopping the carrots and celery that will go into the vegetable soup for lunch.

In the next hour, scores of hungry patrons will begin to line up outside.

House of Yahweh officials don’t know how many of them are homeless. But several patrons say they walked in from local parks, where they have spent restless nights evading police and those who prey on the weak. Some have come on buses, hoisting the sum of their possessions in bulky loads over their shoulders. A few drive up in cars, in what was their only shelter during last week’s rainstorm.

At the head of the line crouches a bearded man who identifies himself only as “William, 28,” who moved to Los Angeles from Michigan three weeks ago to be closer to his daughter.

Although he had enough savings to rent an apartment, the former lumberjack has had little luck finding a job. For the last two weeks, his only meal of the day has been what he gets at House of Yahweh.

“If this wasn’t here, I’d be very hungry,” William says. “This place here is worthwhile. To me, it gives people hope.”

At 10 a.m., a House of Yahweh volunteer unlocks the door. William and the 40 or so other men and women file in for fresh coffee and doughnuts donated daily by the Donut Exchange in Hawthorne. Several people read the newspaper. A few check the help-wanted ads.

When the doors close at 11 a.m. to give volunteers time to prepare for the 11:30 lunch, a woman toting her belongings in several plastic grocery bags takes a cup of milk across the street and perches on a low, cement-block wall beside Sunrise Printing Services. Soon, she is joined by a shabbily dressed man who also had breakfast at the soup kitchen.

They will sit there for the next 30 minutes, occasionally pacing up and down the street, waiting for lunch to be served.

Sunny Phan, the print shop’s owner, shakes his head. “I talked to them before,” he said, gesturing toward the pair outside. “I said, ‘You cannot sit here. My customers get scared.’ But they don’t listen.”

On his way into the office this morning, Phan said he stepped past a man smelling of alcohol who was sleeping in front of a neighboring restaurant. Although House of Yahweh refuses to feed anyone who appears to be drunk, Phan said he believes the man will be among those standing in line for lunch later today.

A Vietnamese refugee who came to the United States in 1989, Phan says he feels sorry for the handicapped and mentally ill who are served by the agency. But, he says, he has little sympathy for the able-bodied people among the soup kitchen’s patrons.

“I was hungry like them before but I got to go to work and make money to eat,” Phan says. “In the two hours they wait to get the food, I could make 10 bucks. To me, it makes the people lazy.”

Norm Wilson of Wilson Realty & Investment, who notified city officials that House of Yahweh’s controversial expansion project did not conform to zoning requirements, says his female customers are so intimidated by the look of the agency’s clients that he regularly escorts them to their cars. When questioned about the problems the charity poses, he pulls out a photograph of a man urinating in the bushes outside his office.

Working next to House of Yahweh is “sort of like having a prison in your back yard or a nuclear plant,” Wilson said. “It’s an undesirable type of operation.”

Marie Mendoza, a retired banker who has lived on Burin Avenue for the past 22 years, agrees. When she first moved into the neighborhood, she enjoyed taking classes at the community center next to City Hall and taking daily walks. Today, she avoids walking alone on the streets, even in daylight.

“I worked 35 years to build my little nest so I wouldn’t have to bother anyone,” Mendoza said. “And now I feel I’ve been blown out of the water. I just feel violated by the people (Sister Michele) is bringing in here.”

As she speaks, Rob and Chantal, a young couple who have just dined at House of Yahweh, roll a shopping cart filled with cans past her house. “I caught him giving himself a bath with my hose right in front of my house,” she says, pointing to Rob.

As might be expected, House of Yahweh’s most vocal opponents tend to live and work near the soup kitchen. But there are other voices in the neighborhood, too.

Among them is Sandra Neal, a Lawndale mother who lives with her 11 children in a three-bedroom house on Burin Avenue about a block from the agency. One of more than 250 families that receive free groceries from House of Yahweh every week, Neal thinks people who complain about House of Yahweh are “just selfish.”

“What are you supposed to do if you can’t afford to go to the store to get the things you need?” Neal asks. “I’m poor, I want to be an independent person . . . but I really need help.”

Donna Hoak and Lee Burke, who also live on Burin Avenue, say they have never had any trouble from House of Yahweh’s patrons. “We see them all the time,” Hoak, 39, said. “They’re dirty, they stink. But where else are they going to go? That’s not a reason to condemn them. I think the community should support it.”

Sally Pelkie, who lives near House of Yahweh and once found a man sleeping in her back yard, says she has “mixed feelings about the place.”

“I feel very sorry for the people,” the 55-year-old musician and former nurse said. “But just going to the corner to the post office, I feel very nervous. I think most of them are nice but I don’t know about all of them. . . . They’re human beings and they need help, but I also feel there’s a criminal element that almost never can be reached.”

Surprisingly, some of the soup kitchen’s own patrons are equally ambivalent.

Robert Malloy, a clean and neatly dressed man in his mid-40s who spends what little money he has washing his clothes at a local Laundromat, regularly eats lunch at House of Yahweh, fortifying himself for another night at Alondra Park.

Until a few months ago, the former county maintenance worker and Vietnam veteran says, he had never been unemployed or on the streets. He appreciates the hot meal he gets at House of Yahweh but he is sympathetic to the neighbors’ complaints.

“I wouldn’t want it,” Malloy says. “It’s too close to a major highway, and this is a residential area. If you’re going to have this stuff, it should be in an industrial area.”