I've been volunteering occasionally with a group of friends who cooks and distributes how breakfast and lunches in MacArthur Park. Sophia Benoit, who I follow on Twitter, retweeted an event flier for it. I don't know Sophia. I don't know if Sophia personally knows Eva, the contact for the group, but MacArthur Park is near my apartment downtown, and homelessness is a heavy feature of this area. I signed up.
The group isn't even organized under a name. Eva said they're just a group of friends helping out. Eva does this as her full-time job, getting support on Patreon for her living expenses. She looks young, in her thirties, but she has a teenaged daughter, so she might be older. The group feeds hundreds of people every week, and does special events -- with hair cuts and first aid supplies and the like -- once a month.
They started by just doing a meal-swap thing amongst themselves. They were really proud of the food they were making and were making it in big quantities. They started to figure, why not just make it in huge quantities?
Eva told me she grew up in a cult. She didn't elaborate and I didn't ask her to. Although, of course, I'd like to know more. They got out of the cult, and her mom used to take her into town when she was working. She'd buy little bottles of booze and cheap cigarettes and hand them out to the people who couldn't afford them. Her attitude was something like, "They shouldn't have to be poor and miserable." Eva was raised that if you had the capacity to help someone, you had the obligation to help them. Otherwise you're a bastard. She said she's just trying not to be a bastard.
She also started talking about how the problem wasn't going to be solved in our lifetime. For her, that was the reason to do something, not not to do something. It reminded me of how cities used to build cathedrals that would take multiple generations to finish. The lack of immediate result not being an argument against its execution. There's an anti-hope to it. An anti-optimism. You do it because it is the thing to do. Nothing guaranteed.
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