San Francisco: Between a nondescript hotel and a blue-tiled grocer, a rectangular sign with a white cross marks the Fraternite Notre Dame Mary of Nazareth House in San Francisco.
Inside the modest space, two French-speaking nuns sleep in a tiny back room and prepare daily lunches for hundreds of homeless people, a service that has become indispensable in the poor Tenderloin neighbourhood. But all around it are telltale signs of the city’s rapid development, as the dingy street on which the soup kitchen stands is just around the corner from a revitalised district with a Bloomingdale’s, Levi’s and Saks Fifth Avenue.
Since 2008, Sisters Mary Benedicte and Mary of the Angels have offered a refuge from the streets with their baked goods and home cooking, which is among the most popular soup kitchen fare around, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
“They’re so very sweet,” 60-year-old Douglas Fennell told the Chronicle as he waited to receive sausage, mixed salad and cherry-topped cake this week. “These nuns give us love, they pray for us, they are friendly. They don’t look down on us.”
But skyrocketing rents may soon make the nuns as homeless as the people they serve.
According to the Chronicle and the Associated Press, Benedicte and of the Angel’s landlord have threatened them with eviction if they don’t shoulder a 50 per cent rent hike.
The change would increase costs from $3,465 (Dh12,726) to $5,500 a month, the journalists reported.
The lower rent is hard enough to pay as it is. The nuns devote most of their time to running the kitchen, while seeking donations and selling French pastries to farmer’s markets on the side.
“All I want to do is help the homeless,” Mary of the Angels told the Chronicle in a thick French accent. “Homeless people often have no affection, and here we can say hello and give them some good food.”
The sisters are part of the greater Fraternite Notre Dame religious order, which was founded in France in 1977. According to the San Francisco chapter’s web site, they feed more than 300 people every day.
“They live in the streets, under the bridges,” the web site says. But the soup kitchen gives them nourishment. “You cannot imagine how much we long for this meal every week!,” says one quote.
Mary Benedicte and Mary of the Angels also deliver meals to senior citizens and Aids patients, and they were planning on starting a pantry program for families.
All this is now at risk.
“This is just crazy — I can’t believe it,” Fennell told the Chronicle. “Maybe someone is just trying to drive us homeless people away. I don’t understand.”
San Francisco’s homeless population has increased by 7 per cent in the last 10 years. The most recent citywide street and shelter count found 6,686 individuals.
A lawyer for the sisters’ landlord, Nick Patel, said in an email to the AP that “no eviction is going forward.” The owner of the building is currently in India, and plans to meet with Mary Benedicte and Mary of the Angels when he returns on Thursday.
The nuns’ lawyer, Daniel Fitzpatrick, is helping them fight the eviction pro bono.
For Mary Benedicte and Mary of the Angels, theirs is more than a project to feed the poor. It is a tight-knit community offering the kind of warmth that’s difficult to come by on the streets.
“We not only feed them, we try to love them,” Benedicte said. “Poor people, what’s very hard for them is to be alone on the street. Some of them say the hardest part of living on the street is that nobody wants to speak with them.”