April is well underway at this point and sunshine has replaced the typical rainy days of February and March. This week’s menu features a number of chicken dishes, prepared in various ways. A few of the different flavors our guests will enjoy include:classic BBQ, Adobo w/ fennel and paprika, and chicken simmered in dijon mustard. For many of St. Anthony’s guests, the meal they eat in the dining room will be the only meal they eat that day. That means the nutritional value of every meal the dining room serves is that much more important. Almost 40% of our diners are over the age of 50, and their health depends on nutritious meals. Chicken is a great and economical way to provide our diners with the protein and low fat options they need. Meat-eaters rejoice, as Easter Sunday quickly approaches, and meat on Friday’s is once again acceptable. Easter Sunday’s meal will be Beef Bourguignon, a French recipe, traditional preparation includes simmering the beef in red wine (of course the alcohol is cooked out in the process), making the meat even richer and more tender.

April 6 Pork Braised in Coconut Milk: served with vegetables and rice

April 7 BBQ Chicken: fresh vegetables and mashed potatoes

April 8 Chicken Adobo: seasoned with orange, fennel, paprika, and saffron

April 9 Tortilla Casserole: layers of tortillas, chicken, salsa and cheese

April 10 Vegetable and Cheese Quiche: fresh veggies, cheese, and eggs

April 11 Chicken Dijon: simmered in mustard sauce

April 12 Easter Sunday Beef Bourguignon: served with carrots and mushrooms.

Please check back for weekly installments of On The Menu!

“I like color: white and pink and blue and yellow. Something loud. So I thought, an island. I’ll put them on an island.”

Barbara Coleman is explaining how a quilt is made. Not only made, but conceived, constructed, corrected, and finished.  Barbara is a member of the Madonna Quilters, and their work was on display at the San Francisco Quilters Guild 2009 quilt show at the Concourse Exhibition Center last weekend. The group includes residents, house social workers, and program volunteers.

All of the Madonna quilts in the Guild show are mermaid quilts. The group decided to do mermaid quilts from Laurel Burch’s mermaid fabric after quilt artist Jeanne Jacobson shared her mermaid quilt from Laurel Burch’s fabric design.

After Laurel Burch, the resemblance ends. Each quilt is a picture of mermaids and the sea, made from innumerable different fabric sources: an aqua water pattern, several fish patterns, and a fabric with palm trees.  Some of the women have stitched on embroidery thread for hair, sequins for eyes or scales, fuzzy yarn for sand, shells as abstract borders or as inhabitants of the underwater kingdom.

Gretchen Nelson included humans swimming around her mermaid. Molly Wu’s quilt is threaded with fabric showing notes on music staves because mermaids sing.

Barbara’s mermaids have yarn hair. One of her fish has sequin eyes; another has a tiny toy eye that showed up in the donated materials. Barbara is from New Orleans. Crystals dot the water in a very Louisiana take on mermaids: “I thought of the fireflies on the water,” she says.

The San Francisco Quilters’ Guild had their annual show last weekend, (which I believe we will hear more about in tomorrow’s blog) and the senior ladies from St. Anthony’s Madonna Residence were invited to display their most recent quilting projects. It was really great to see the women come out and show their work. What was unexpectedly impacting to me, was seeing the work that St. Anthony’s does in a broader social context.

Usually coming to work throughout the week, my view of our services is from the perspective of someone on the inside. I know the statistics of homelessness and poverty, understand the advocacy work, I have heard the personal stories of guests that come through our programs, been around on the holidays and celebrated with folks here in the Dining Room. Yet this weekend offered a new perspective, away from “home turf.”

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I was really concerned about the one-sidedness of Peter Jamison’s article ["Their Daily Bread," Feature, 2/4]. The way it was written, it sounds like only drug dealers and drug users use the soup kitchens in the Tenderloin. Nothing could be further from the truth, as there are many reasons folks use this service.

I, for one, am a senior on a low, fixed income who would not be able to make ends meet every month if not for the lunches I eat at St. Anthony’s. Because they allow you to take food home in containers, I happily eat the same thing for lunch as well as dinner on those days. The food is always good and nutritious, and the worst meal I ever got there was still better than what Glide Memorial serves regularly. There are also many employed folks who eat at St. Anthony’s — folks who just started a job, or low-wage-earners who are lucky enough to have the time to be able to make it there to eat lunch.

Stop trying to “clean up” the Tenderloin, and “clean up” your reporting by telling the whole story.

Terrrie Frye
San Francisco

You’ve run out of ideas. You’ve run out of time. You have time to shop, but not time to think.  Is there such a thing as knowing someone too long? Relationships grow richer as years pass, but that doesn’t necessarily apply to presents.

Your idealistic friend, family member, honorary aunt or uncle may appreciate a a gift to St. Anthony Foundation in his or her honor. We’ve just had beautiful new cards designed; they open up almost like a present.

Does your loved one live or have they ever lived in San Francisco? Do they worry about poor people, hungry people, underfunded veterans, seniors alone in the world? Are they thinking of someone struggling with an addiction or a psychiatric disability?

A gift to St. Anthony’s may have more meaning for them than anything you can find in a store.

It’s simple. Make a donation by mail or on line. Include the name and address of the person being honored and the occasion you’re honoring: birthday, graduation, anniversary. You get a letter acknowledging your gift. Your loved one gets the card shown here, informing them that you’ve give a gift on the occasion they are celebrating.

Money can’t buy love, but love can transform money into health, hope, and human dignity. And that can transform lives.

I love my job as Advocacy Coordinator here at St. Anthony Foundation, and one of my favorite things to do is to talk politics with the women who live at St. Anthony’s Madonna Senior Center and Residence. Last month, I asked our Madonna residents if they’d like me to organize some non-partisan debate watching parties in the recreation room at the center. I wasn’t too surprised when they accepted my offer, and  I prepared for the party by trying to figure out which type of snacks would go best with our evening of political discourse.

Our Madonna residents don’t pull any punches, and they certainly aren’t shy about speaking their minds! The opinions and comments that were flying around the room while we watched the debate were significantly more entertaining and informative than the debate tracking graph at the bottom of the television screen.

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Low-income San Franciscans will pay for the second disappointing public budget of the year. Last month, the city passed a budget with staggering cuts to health and human services, especially for poor people. The city budget will reduce or close many non-profits serving the poor.

This month, the state ended the longest budget stalemate in California’s history by passing one that slashes services to the poor and homeless. These are the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable.

The Working Poor

• $70 million cut from child care for CalWorks families
• CalWorkers paid the same wages as in 2004

Seniors

• The entire $190.1 million cut from Senior Citizens Property and Renters’ Tax Assistance
• All cost of living increases cut for 2 consecutive years
• Cuts in Senior Community Employment, Home Delivered Meals, Adult Protective Services, and Multipurpose Senior Services Program

Families and Sick People

• Inadequate cap on dental coverage for children in the Healthy Families program
• Apply twice a year to keep children in Medi-Cal
• $7.7 million cut from mental health managed care
• 5% cut in provider rate for health, dental, and vision plans
• No California Prescription Drug Program for another year

The Homeless

• Complete elimination of the Emergency Homeless Assistance Program. Two San Francisco shelters will lose significant funding.

At St. Anthony Foundation, we’re getting ready for the new guests these cuts will bring to our doors.  That’s why we’re putting up new facilities and refocusing our work. The future is asking more of all of us.

I’ve been writing about the people we serve who once served others. The middle-aged woman I interviewed who lost her apartment after taking care of a terminally ill brother. The elderly woman who couldn’t find work in her home country after caring for her father all of her life. The veterans from a succession of generations, still broken by the wars they fought in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The seniors who worked full time into their early 70’s.

“I’ve always worked for a living,” Maggie told me,” I’ve always had a nice apartment. I’ve been on my own for a long, long time. Of course I’d never been homeless before. This was a first, and a shock.”

What is remarkable to me is the lack of bitterness in the stories our guests tell. All they can talk about is how grateful they are for the help they receive from St. Anthony’s. They talk about the hope they feel as they begin to address their situations, a hope they credit to St. Anthony’s rather than to their own courage and resilience. People going through the Dining Room line praise the security team for treating them with respect and friendliness, for acting more like hosts than guards.  Maggie wants to be sure I include her thanks to Fr. John and Sister Andrea in what I write “for their wonderful council.”  Bertha praises the staff and guests at the Madonna Residence for creating community.

“When I first came here, I was welcomed with open arms,” Bertha said.  “Everyone here made me feel at home.”

Community and respect seem like small recompense for all Bertha has done for others.  The same is true of so many of our guests.