Dinners Warm Empty Stomachs

By SIMONE HOEDEL (published in the Voice, Fall 1993)

It's Thanksgiving on the downtown east side in Vancouver. On this sunny day, street people are lined up on Cordova Street around the block outside the Union Gospel Mission, near Oppenheimer Park.

They're here for the food: a hot turkey dinner with dressing, mashed potatoes, carrots, gravy, pumpkin pie and coffee.

But first, each group of one hundred people is led into the chapel for a church service. The group, mostly Native, sat with their heads bowed until the folk songs are over. From there, they are led to the spotless dining room next door.

Brother Daniel is a Franciscan friar, a brother in a Catholic order, who manages the daily sandwich line two blocks west of the Mission on Cordova at the Sisters of Atonement. The Sisters feed 800 to 1,000 street people a day.

Brother Daniel says most of the people on the streets are addicted to alcohol and drugs and can't manage their own lives. A large number are mentally ill. Many more are elderly or street kids. A lot of the people in the food line-up are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty, crime, and substance abuse. Most live in cockroach infested hotel rooms and rooming houses that don't have kitchen facilities. That's why they use these soup lines.

The standard rental rate for a hotel room on the downtown eastside is $325 a month, exactly what welfare allows for accommodation expenses. The remaining $210 is supposed to pay for all other essential living expenses, which for many includes not only food, but a drug or alcohol habit, and cigarettes.

Rich MacHale, who lives at Salvation Army's Harbour Light Center on Cordova Street said that 75 per cent of the people on the streets have drug or alcohol problems. MacHale said he lost everything because of his alcohol problems and ended up living on the outskirts of skid row in Vancouver.

"When you have nothing, your self-esteem is low. How do you go and apply for a job when you don't have any clothes?" MacHale said.

Three blocks east of the Harbour Light, members of the Quest Outreach Society prepare turkey dinners in the basement of St. James Church. The organization, which serves about 6,000 meals a week to the homeless in Vancouver and Burnaby, is staffed by volunteers.

Jim Georgica, a volunteer with Quest for the past year and a half, has been living on the streets for more than 25 years. He was put in an orphanage in Saskatchewan for a while when he was ten years old and said he never really got over feeling rejected by his mother and stepfather. Running away from home at 15, it wasn't long before he had an alcohol problem and was spending six or seven months of the year in jail.

When asked if he will ever see a time when he is out of this rut, Georgica answers with a quote from a George Thorogood song .... “I’ve been down so long, it seems like up to me.”