During the winter St. Josephhouse opens for a nightshelter every night, taking out matresses for about 20 people and so filling the dining hall for the night.
Then they get up in the morning and prepare for the soupline at lunch - almost every day. Wow!
Now it is summer (well not quite, concerning the weather, it's much colder here than in Kansas City) and the nightshelter is closed.
Today Trudy was the chef and Susan and I were helping with peeling and cutting potatoes to make a wonderful vegetable hash, cutting celery and filling it with peanut butter and preparing lunch bags to give out to the guests for the following day. Then we were asked to help serve the lunch.
St. Josephhouse opens at 9:30am and people come in and have coffee and sweets, are offered a shower if they like and are able to wait inside for. There are two servings of lunch, one starts at 11:15am, the second at 12:00pm. The guests come into the dininghall and sit down, then we said thanks together and then everybody came to the serving table.
During the whole morning Trudy kept on introducing us to tons of people as the European catholic workers and we got a pretty good feeling of the huge network of St. Josephhouse.
Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention that this is the oldest house in the catholic worker tradition. It was started in 1941 and Peter Maurin has slept here! Today it is a vivid community of people some of whome are living in the house and some are living in the neighbourhood.
When closing the nightshelter for the summer they offer some of the rooms to people who can't find housing and they additionally run Dorothy Day House, with renting apartments on a low rent.
Well, there will be more about this house later.
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