For the 31st year in a row, Central Lutheran Church in downtown Anchorage is providing Thanksgiving dinners for people in need. They started with 39 families — and now, through a partnership with the Food Bank of Alaska — they serve 1,400. But it takes a lot to get a complete turkey dinner back home.
Sweat drips from under Payton Augafa’s Santa Claus hat as he grabs a bag of apples and potatoes and scurries to a table filled with canned vegetables.
“What we have is green beans and corn,” he tells Barbara Moxie, offering her a choice of vegetables.
Moxie is picking up her Thanksgiving dinner basket complete with stuffing, cranberries, and a turkey with a baking pan. She gets everything she needs within three minutes and looks a little stunned.
“It was fun,” she says, laughing. “It was so fast! Not like last year. Last year was really slow.”
Lutheran Social Services executive director Allen Budahl says it took six months of planning, over a hundred volunteers, and thousands of donated cans of vegetables to get to this point. Central Lutheran is one of 12 different distribution sites around Anchorage and the Valley that will provide food to more than 10,000 families this holiday, including turkeys ordered by the Food Bank back in January.
Volunteers started setting up at 6 a.m. and will work in shifts until everything is cleaned up at 10 p.m.
A group of eighth graders inspects bags of apples. “We are quality control. We make sure they aren’t rotten,” they chorus.
Other volunteers cautiously load tables with cans. “A couple of our tables are a little older, and we’re worried this one’s gonna go,” says Anna Bryant.
But the table is still standing when Augafa zips through. He’s surprisingly high energy given that he went straight to the church after working a graveyard shift.
“I’m starting to get a little delirious. I mean, I didn’t know there were gonna be so many stairs we’d have to go up and down,” he says. People register to receive turkeys on the first floor but pick them up on the second. “I’m sweating. You know, I’m knocking out two birds with one stone. My doctor said I needed to walk because I’m getting a little heavy. So I’m walking!”
Augafa signed up to volunteer for the event with a group of friends. “I’ve always felt that, you know, if you’ve been blessed and taken care of, it’s basically your duty to give back. That’s how humanity should be, you know. We should look at each other and want to take care of each other, you know.”
Outside the church, a line of people waiting to register snakes through the parking lot. On the other side of the building, people plan how to get their turkeys home. Some have cars, others take the bus.
Edwin Bratts says the food is too heavy to carry the ten blocks home, so he’s devised another method.
“It’s box with a hole and I put my food in there. And I use my pants belt to drag it home, like a sled,” he explains, holding his pants up with his other hand. “They’re falling already.”
“Do you think you’ll make it?” I inquire.
“That’s why I got three boxes. If one breaks, I use another one. So by the third one I should be home.”
And with that, he takes off, box sliding over the snow, ready to cook Thanksgiving dinner for his girlfriend and his kid.
Anne Hillman is the healthy communities editor at Alaska Public Media and a host of Hometown, Alaska. Reach her at ahillman@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Anne here.
