Giving back for the holidays

Bearing the cold to help the underprivileged can help cure what ails you — if you let it

By Jeremy Schnitker

Normally, I would be in bed nursing a hangover.

But on this particular Saturday morning, I was going to be standing in the parking lot of a Southside church handing out food and clothing to the underprivileged with a bunch of strangers from a church group.

As my alarm went off at 7 a.m., hours earlier than I’ve been used to rising on a weekend morning for the past eight years, I had to take a moment to remind myself why I was doing this.

Like so many single young people who have uprooted themselves from their hometowns to live in the big city, there’s a massive void of affection in my life that my family once filled. Aside from my friends and two cousins, I’m virtually alone in Chicago, which means I (a.) don’t give or receive a lot of hugs, and (b.) have a lot of time on my hands.

I figured there was a way to cure both of these ills simultaneously, so I started looking into area homeless shelters to donate my time. Thankfully, I found that there were quite a few, and they were all in need of help. But before I was to commit to anything, before I immersed myself into a consistent philanthropic routine, I wanted to make sure this was

something my heart was into 100 percent.

I also thought it would be interesting to write about, so I mentioned the idea to the publisher of this magazine, and he told me of a friend whose church group went to a Southside church the second Saturday of every month to help hand out meals and whatnot. An e-mail later, and I was on board to do so with a group of peers I’ve never met from a church I’ve never heard of.

After nervously introducing myself to the group of about 15 or so volunteers at an Einstein Bagel on Clark that morning, we began the caravan to 81st and Dobson.

As we got there and unloaded our stuff, the wind was whipping viciously. The previous week had been the coldest of the season (go figure, the first time I decide to do something like this and it’s on one of the coldest days of the year).

In some respects, though, that gives one more cause. Despite the potentially fatally cold temperatures that had set upon the city in early December, there were still a lot of people on the streets, and I honestly couldn’t fathom how they were surviving.

If there was ever a time to help out, this was it.

When we got to the parking lot, there was already a line of about 40 or so people patiently waiting to be fed as we set up shop. Volunteers from the church had brought bundles of winter clothing for those who needed it to sift through. Both our group and the church members formed a makeshift buffet line with everything from chili to chicken and hot dogs and an assortment of drinks. There were a half-dozen SUVs and mini-vans stacked to the brim with grocery bags filled with gifts we were to hand out to the different age groups.

I was assigned to hand out gift bags to 8-to-12-year-old-girls. With a fluorescent marker and a light to shine on the marks I’d make, I stood there with another guy my age whom I’d met at Einstein’s, ready to play Santa for a day. (Apparently, in the past, there had been issues with people attempting to snag more than once bag. Hence the highly technical hand-marking system.)

The initial rush was filled with people of all ages: infants, teenagers, moms, dads and grandparents. At first, I was surprised by the lack of excitement from them all. I expected to be bombarded with jubilant faces excited about the fact they were getting a free meal, clothes and gifts. I was a bit taken aback by the tenor of expectancy displayed — it all appeared to be a little too routine.

But then again, it was very cold. Nobody was necessarily ecstatic to be outside on this morning, even if it meant getting something for free. The expressionless prepubescent girls I was giving gifts and wishing “Merry Christmas” to were likely just being their naturally shy selves. When you’re that age, talking to strangers is rarely a comfortable thing, not to mention when you’re standing in line to get free toys in December.

After the first hour there, I began to bond with other volunteers I’d come with — they were a humorous and down-to-earth lot — and a steady stream of people continued to pour in. Ryan, the guy who spearheaded our wing of the operation, would later tell me on the car ride back up north that this was the largest crowd he had seen yet.

In true Chicago fashion, the three factions remained relatively heterogeneous. Those of us who came down from the north exchanged stories of where we went to college with one another. Those in the Southside church group talked amongst their families. And those who showed up for the food and gifts pretty much kept to themselves. I imagined there’d be more conversing between the three parties, (again, see cold) and the fact we were all bundled up so tightly, we could barely distinguish one another. Winter weather is not the best conduit for dialogue.

As the morning progressed, we had our spoilers — mostly middle-aged men asking us for bags of kids toys. We were told not to give any bags out to those who didn’t actually have children with them because they may take them and sell them for cash down the street. But when you’ve got a complete stranger swearing to you that he lives right across the street and didn’t want to bring his kids out in the weather, it’s hard to argue. So I’d just usually wind up giving them a bag. (As we wrapped things up, I don’t remember a single child coming up and asking me for a bag after we’d gotten rid of them all, so I didn’t feel that bad.)

At about 11:30 a.m., new faces stopped appearing and the food was running out, so we starting folding up chairs and cleaning off tables with numb hands before we were called into a circle for mass prayer.

Usually, as one who left his religion years ago, I stay out of these situations. But considering I was surely the only non-Christian volunteer there, I didn’t want to make things any more awkward, so I joined hands with a middle-aged man to my left and a woman about my age to my right. The pastor dove into a wordy 10-minute prayer that was the closest thing to the stereotypical Hollywood-esque African-American church services I’d seen in real life.

While everybody else was praying, I was thinking how what I’d seen that morning had made me more jaded than I was going into it. The whole day I had a feeling that I was merely helping put a patch over a deeper problem that needed complete overhauling. I thought that this was all a little too retroactive.

Getting clothes and food once a month is great, and it’s tremendous that the church and other volunteers took the time to provide them, but these people need so much more. We’d only provided temporary relief for their hunger and discomfort. I wondered just how much help one person, like myself, could be, and seeing how overwhelming the poverty here was, I questioned if it was even worth it to do this on a regular basis.

When the prayer was done, the grown man next to me looked me straight in the eye, said “Thank You” and gave me a big, warm hug. Just as I turned from him, the woman standing to my right reached up and gave me another hug and threw in a kiss on the cheek.

“Thank you so much, honey … you kids are great,” she said smiling.

For the first time that day, I felt like I was part of a family, and those two simple gestures of kindness single-handedly made the mornings efforts seem more worthwhile.

I realized at that moment that, no matter if I felt or even saw myself making a difference, this was something I should be doing more often.

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