This group meets once every month to listen to talks and advice. There is also a monthly community service at a local food bank in L.A. where we package foods or hand out dry goods. This year, the group was at El Paso, Texas for a “Border Awareness Experience” hosted by Fr. Bill Morton, where we learned about the troubles every migrant has to go through to get to America and at least work to support their families back home.

We did work such as painting the outside of the Columban Mission House and even gardening in the community garden. And not only work, we were even able to walk up to the border just right before the bridge.

Photos by Richard Kim

A group of volunteers helping rebuild a house in New Orleans.

Today volunteers are still helping rebuild homes.

The St. Columban Youth Charity Association was organized in the Los Angeles area to set up mission trip opportunities for high school students and young adults. One such trip led 12 people to spend Aug. 1-7 in New Orleans.

John Chang is the young adult coordinator for the association and has made four trips to the area. He said 12 people have spent the week divided between two houses in New Orleans, one in Mid City and one in West Bank.

“At this house we are doing wood panel flooring and some other minor carpentry work, and at the other house they are doing similar structural work, flooring, drywall and painting,” Chang said.

A group of young adults traveled to New Orleans to help the poor rebuild their homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

He said some of the houses, like the one he is helping with, were actually built on a foundation about five-feet high, but the flood waters in the area reached seven feet high after the levies broke following Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

“Some people would start fixing (their houses) and they would run out of money,” Chang said. “Some don’t have money at all. Some are disabled, elderly, or low-income, so those people are the ones that still have houses here today that are not livable.”

Columban Father Tony Mortell established the youth organization during his mission time in Los Angeles. Different groups make trips to New Orleans and San Antonio. In New Orleans, the group works with Operation Helping Hands, a program of Catholic Charities in New Orleans.

For more background on the association, read the story in the May 2009 issue of Columban Mission (page 12).

Saturday morning is always a busy time at the St. Francis Center in downtown Los Angeles, California, where I volunteer to help feed the homeless. The center is not big enough to cater to the growing number of homeless people in the city of the angels. It has a dining hall which serves approximately 40 people at one time, and a kitchen for volunteers like me who

prepare the food which includes coffee, fruit, soup, bread and more. There’s a pantry in the center where other volunteers help to package food, toiletries and fresh produce to donate to the families who come later in the day.

Hunger and Homelessness in Los Angeles

The day starts with the preparation of the dining hall. The volunteers get all the tables and chairs ready, unfolding them to set up the dining area with reasonable space for everybody to move around, bring their food and sit. While we are doing this inside the hall, people are starting to line up outside, patiently waiting until everything is done and they can enter in an orderly fashion.
In the kitchen, there are different groups of people from various parish communities who are volunteering their time and effort for a few hours at the center. The volunteers work on many tasks from setting up the seating area at the start of the day to washing and cleaning up at the end of the day. Volunteers prepare the big food warmer, make coffee, arrange plates, cutlery, napkins and cups. They heat up the pre-cooked soup, make salad and toast the bread. All of these tasks are done in a very organized way. Although nobody actively directs the volunteers, a staff member at the center is always available to answer questions such as the location of the cups or heating pans. The volunteers seem to jump into whatever work they see that needs to be done.

Less than an hour after the volunteers begin, the food is ready to serve. The person in charge at the door is constantly counting the people coming in because of the limited seats inside the hall. As the people cross the threshold of the door, most of them greet the volunteers and staff with a “good morning” and a nice smile. There are some people who don’t smile, but it might be because they had a bad night on the street or something happened to them early that morning. Plates are ready with beans, salad and bread. The people can choose coffee, milk or juice to drink. Desserts are served on the table by the other volunteers.

When I first started volunteering, my job was to pour coffee in the cups. I must have done a good job, because the next time I went, I was in charge of the bread and hotdogs, the first stop after people picked up their beverages. It was not an easy job, since we don’t want people to receive unequal amounts of food. Another concern is the speed of service. We don’t want people to wait too long in line or outside for the first group to finish. As a result, the service needs to be fast like a food court in a shopping mall.

One day while I was going around to the tables to see if anybody wanted a refill of coffee, a man suddenly grabbed me. He was a man who might be in his 60s. With my head down trying to listen to what he was saying amid the bustle of the hall, I suddenly realized that he had started praying for me. He held my head, and he said a prayer in a language that I didn’t understand. Other people at his table were looking at us, and one told me that he was praying. I didn’t understand a single word he uttered, but I felt a sense of gratitude and appreciation for the blessings he received and gratitude for the people who made this service possible. For me it was a blessing, in whatever language he expressed it; I felt so grateful that a person was praying for me. I thanked him in return for this act of blessing, and we exchanged smiles for this brief encounter. He continued eating and enjoyed the fresh cooked food and nice hot cup of coffee.

I didn’t feel tired after all the hard work spent in the center that morning. I keep remembering this act of prayer; it stayed in my heart. Here was a man, surviving on the streets of Los Angeles, who shared his gift of prayer with somebody he doesn’t know, just someone that he sees doing something to help even in a small way. His prayer held great love. He may have been physically hungry and homeless, but he shared great spiritual plenty and an abundance of grace.

With the downturn of the country’s economy, homelessness and hunger in the country are becoming more prevalent. When I first volunteered in that center three years ago, we served 75 people. The number doubled the year after, and now it serves more than 350 people just in one day. It is open every single day to serve and feed the hungry people in the city. There are other feeding centers around the Los Angeles area, but this tiny center brings joy to hungry people and a smile when they receive care, love and attention from others especially when it is coupled with a nice hot cup of coffee. “I was hungry and you gave me food.” Indeed.

Ariel Presbitero is the Regional Lay Missionary Coordinator and Mission Outreach Coordinator in Los Angeles, California.

Columban lay missionary Agnes Jeong Bok Dong prepares food for food pantry shelves in a Chicago parish.

When Christian missions started, Jerusalem was the center of the world, and everywhere else was regarded as “the ends of the Earth.” As recently as 50 years ago, the world could be divided into mission-sending countries and mission-receiving countries. Today, the Church is everywhere. So, today, the center is everywhere, and everywhere is at “the ends of the earth.”

The primary phase of mission, as defined by the Second Vatican Council (Cf. Ad Gentes, the Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity, paragraph 6), is almost completed. We now move into a new phase of mission in which what we used to call mission-receiving countries are now mission-sending countries as well.

Columban Father Gerry Dunne with choir members at a Korean parish in Canoga Park, California.

Our world is a world in motion. Never has there been such a movement of people as millions migrate from country to country in search of a life where they can work, live in peace and raise their families with dignity. The United States has been accustomed to this movement from its beginnings. People of all religions and backgrounds fled persecution and poverty and started a new life here.

Over the last 200 years American parishes have received waves of immigrants. The process continues, but the German, Italian, Polish and Irish immigrants of the 19th and 20th centuries are being replaced by Hispanic, Asian and African migrants. In addition, Western Europe now must cope with millions of migrants from other continents.

Columban mission is responding to today’s needs with migrant apostolates in such diverse places as Los Angeles, London, Dublin, Taiwan and the U.S.-Mexico border.

Women who work in factories in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, are visited by Columban Father Vince McCarthy. The Columbans oversee a parish in Anapra, a rural area west of Juárez, along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In addition, the agents of mission have also changed. Columban priests now come from such diverse countries as Fiji, Ireland, Tonga, Peru, Chile, Korea, the United States and the Philippines.

A further example of this transition can be seen in our Columban lay missionary program. Today, U.S. lay missionaries work in Chile, and Korean lay missionaries work in the United States. The Philippines sends missionaries to Pakistan while Fijians work in Korea. Columban lay missionaries also crisscross the globe.

We believe the risen Jesus is as alive in all of them as He was in Paul and Barnabas on their journeys.