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The Dorothy Day Center is a charity organization that mostly serves food to the poor. On top of that though, the center also helps out with clothes, medical care, financial assistance, and provides housing at night for up to 150 people. About 95 percent of the food served at the Dorothy Day Center was donated by grocery stores, bakeries, farmers, and other organizations of the sort, and the meals are served by volunteers and a staff that works on the site. On any given weekday, the center will serve about 550 meals, and on the weekends they will serve 750 meals per day. The Dorothy Day Center serves breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday, with additional snack like sweet roles and coffee during the day. I have helped out at the Dorothy Day Center on and off for the past two years now, and it is quite an experience. When I have been there we serve a pancake breakfast on Saturday, and the people that come through are just not homeless men. I have served men, women, the elderly and children. There are people who come through the lines that suffer from physical and mental disabilities. We only serve breakfast from 9:00 to 9:30, and for that half an hour the line is almost constantly full, and by the end of the half an hour we start to run out of food, and so we give the people extra sausage or an extra roll, whatever we have left, until it is all gone. Sometime when I've been there we have been able to serve seconds to people, other times not everyone even gets their full first serving. It was quite an eye-opener for me because I never thought there was that much poverty in my own city of St. Paul, because I never really noticed it before. And when you leave your glad you could make some kind of a difference, and at the same time it extremely sadden that you couldn't have done more. The Dorothy Day Center does have a staff that works there full time but it depends on donations and volunteers to keep the place running. So I encourage anyone who has a day to give to go down to the Dorothy Day Center and help out. It is just in Downtown St. Paul, not too far away, and any help they get does make a big difference.

Posted by Jeff Pabarcus at 8:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I went to the Midtown Market, and even though I didn't see as many people as I expected to, there was still a lot of energy circulating through the market. The energy I observed though came in two very different ways. The first way I saw energy is through the most literal meaning of the word, which for humans is food. Food is the energy source for humans and while I was at the market the majority of the people were either eating food, serving food, or standing in line to get food. It was clear that food was the main reason why people came to the market, and since food is the literal meaning of energy for people it was energy itself that brought these people together in the market. The other type of energy I observed though is the energy that people give off when they interact with each other. Now obviously whenever you get people together they will interact with each other at some level whether it is body language, verbal or physical communication, or even just a look that only lasts a second. All of this is human interaction, but I noticed a big difference for the level of energy that I saw at the Midtown market compared to the level of energy I see during one of my lecture classes. The reason for this is because people don’t just come to the Midtown Market to go shopping or get a quick bite to eat, but also because of all the different people and cultures that are at the market. My first impression of the market after walking through it for the first time was that this market was just like the idea of the American melting pot. You had all of these different cultures, languages and styles that came from all of these different places, and you can find them all in this one market. It is this idea of a melting pot that creates so much energy between people. When someone goes there they are able to experience their own cultural heritage, what they are comfortable with, while at the same time better understanding the culture and heritages of people all around them. People are able to find their old identity, which is their heritage, as well as progressively developing and new identity where they incorporate other cultures as well. There is so much energy in this place because people are teaching and learning from each every time they go there. The market isn’t just a place where people go to get food but it is also a place to better understand your neighbor as well as yourself, and I think that is why there is so much energy with the way people interact with each other at the market.

Posted by Jeff Pabarcus at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)