Five days after a sudden hailstorm pummeled Rock Hill, the city’s main soup kitchen was finally able to cook meals Thursday.
“Monday was creative because I was not prepared for anything like that,” said Jan Stephenson, director of Dorothy Day Soup Kitchen on Crawford Road. “We had food, but we couldn't cook it. We made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Monday. We had better sandwiches on Tuesday with turkey and ham and lettuce, and then yesterday we did grilled chicken sandwiches outside. But today is their first day back with a hot meal.”
Like most of its neighbors on Rock Hill’s south side, Dorothy Day Soup Kitchen spent most of this past week without power and without the ability to cook. With no power to refrigerators and freezers, a lot of residents of Southside – Rock Hill’s poorest neighborhood, which also has one of the city’s highest median resident ages – will have to throw out perishable food.
Stephenson said the Soup Kitchen is trying to set up an evening meal, possibly for this coming weekend, to help offset the loss of food in homes.
About 100 residents dropped by on Wednesday, she said.
Stephenson anticipates that the soup kitchen will likely see more visitors next week, as emergency meal distributions by numerous nongovernment agencies currently in town begin leaving over the next week.
Stephenson also expects city food pantries to see more visitors. Sandra Evans, president of Manna House Food Pantry, said Thursday that she has not seen or heard any evidence that more people will arrive for the pantry’s once-a-week food distribution on Saturday – which “already gets 400 people.”
Complicating things for Dorothy Day is the fact that part of Crawford Road is still closed off for repairs, so the city bus that usually drops off dozens of visitors a day directly in front of the soup kitchen can’t get through. The nearest bus stop is on Heckle Boulevard, several blocks away.
“They walk from wherever the bus can drop them off,” Stephenson said. “Some of them walk probably a mile or a mile and a half.”
By press time, the city did not have an estimate of when bus service will resume to Crawford Road.
Stephenson said she is most concerned for the senior visitors who rely on the soup kitchen for meals.
“Eventually everything will get back to where they can reroute to get through even if the road is closed down in that other direction,” she said. “But it's just devastating our seniors.”
