"...This load aint nothin compared to some of my other ones! I bet you didn’t expect all that food to fit in that trunk now did ya? Don’t you feel silly! What did I tell you man, we got JESUS on our side! Of course all the food we’ll ever need is gonna fit into the back of this here truck!”
"...Jeremy, a recovering meth addict renting a room in Huff’s house for $2.00 a day greats us with an uncoordinated wave and jogs towards the truck to help unload it. Huff whistles as he runs back and forth, carrying the 50-pound boxes to the waiting tables in his front yard like they weigh nothing. It takes him only ten minutes to move the entire load.
The first guests show up at 11:47 a.m., but Huff tells them they’ll have to wait until noon to be served. “I need every minute I can get,” he says. “If I get distracted for just a second, everything will fall behind, and I can’t let that happen.” To help get things ready to go, Huff asks the early newcomers to help organize and clean whatever they can outside while they wait. They respectfully oblige and start washing down the tables and sorting through the boxes of fruit, separating the spoiled produce from the good and organizing each one by its content. "
Women and children are allotted a half hour to peruse the days grocery selection before any man is allowed in the yard.
It is estimated that 36.2 million Americans struggled with some form of hunger last year, which comes out to a little over 12 percent of the nations population, or one out of every eight Americans. A study done by US department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found that on any given day in 2008, there were roughly 664,000 sheltered and unsheltered homeless people living in the United States.
“When the average person thinks about homeless people, they usually think of people on the street panhandling,” said Leslie Carlson, coordinator of Plan To End Homelessness, a Tucson based organization that assists needy and homeless people throughout Pima County. “But instead, they should visualize a school bus full of children, because a third of the 5,500 homeless people in Pima County are children, and half of them are families. Just because your homeless doesn’t mean you live on the streets.” Families will oftentimes room with friends or relatives when times get rough, couch hopping from one house to another until they can find a new place to live or another job to help support the family, so they are rarely seen in the public eye as homeless.
As the end of the half hour period approaches, Huff signals to one of the helpers that the women will need to start exiting the yard in three minutes, so to avoid any interaction between the male group anxiously waiting at the gate.
