Every night, hundreds of Erie residents go to bed hungry and every day, hundreds of them don’t get enough to eat. There are dozens of organizations in the region trying to help. One of them is Emmaus Ministries. They supply 200 hot meals a day at the Emmaus Soup Kitchen to anyone who comes, from infant to senior citizens. The soup kitchen provides 60 homemade meals a day at the Kids Café for inner-city children ages 6-17. They also give out about 600 bags of groceries a week to needy families. “You don’t have to register for anything or even pray, you just have to be hungry”, says Sister Mary Miller, Director of Emmaus Ministries.
The Emmaus Ministries believes in the dignity, value, and potential of every person. The Emmaus Soup Kitchen was founded in 1974. “It was during the Vietnam War and there was protesting. They decided that demonstrating wasn’t enough, they needed to help the people suffering”, explains Miller. During the first month they were opened, approximately 800 people are served. Anyone that comes to the door is served. In the summer, the soup kitchen serves around 150 to 250 meals a day. All the work that is done at Emmaus is by volunteers. “Most days providing the food is the easy part, most people just want a friend. We really get to know our guests, we’ve been to their weddings and funerals we meet their children and grandchildren. We are like a family”, says Margaret Kloecker, an Administrative Assistant at Emmaus.
The Ministry doesn’t just want to help people, but they want to get to know the people they are helping. They want to direct people on to the right path and show them how great of a person they can be. Emmaus Ministries reaches out and gives support to the people of society who get left out and left behind at times of crisis, to the single mother whose life is a constant struggle and can’t provide simple necessities for her children, to the child lost in poverty, and to the working who work in the lowest of low paying jobs and never get ahead.
“When I first started this I wanted to say in my life time we could close the kitchen, which wont happen because the numbers have increased. But the generosity and awareness of hunger in Erie has increased, too” Sister Mary Miller says.
-Bonnie Heyman