Like most other churches in our area, San Antonio Mennonite Church is holding their Sunday services online during the pandemic. But there still are things going on outside the building to keep members of the church and the community involved.
The church received a 2019 High Impact Grant from Impact San Antonio to relocate and update the kitchen and build new restrooms in the community building. The enlarged and upgraded facilities will enable the church to serve more people in their Southtown area, including asylum seekers.
“We have picked out the new appliances we plan to buy and decided where to place them,” said Congregational Chair Mitzi Moore. “We decided to add four gender-neutral private bathrooms, two of them handicap accessible, where the kitchen used to be.”
The property outside the church has become a gathering place, Moore said, and pop-up businesses there are helping people seeking asylum.
“The church has a parking lot next to it. We tore down a storage building there, and now we have two food trucks and a colorful bus. One is a coffee truck run by the asylum seekers we support in our community. In the food truck, a woman from Honduras and her daughter make pupusas, which are like a bean taco with vegetables on top.
“We used to have a hospitality house around the corner, and 10,000 people have come through that house since 2016. But with the ‘remain in Mexico’ policy, we don’t get very many anymore,” she said, referring to a government policy that requires asylum seekers to stay in Mexico until their case makes it through the courts.
“Instead, about half a dozen families have settled here permanently, and we have been supporting them through our Love Fund via donations. They work a few hours a week on the coffee truck, and the money goes back to their support. Some are from Central America, one woman is from the Congo and another is from Tajikistan.”
A few of the asylum seekers laid gravel at the back of the parking lot and put in colorful tables and chairs, Moore said. There is a stage at one end.
“Someone gave us a bus, and we are turning it into a pop-up shop, with fair trade goods such as clothes and purses that family members of the refugees mail in,” she said. “The remodeling that we’re doing inside the church didn’t leave room for our books, so we are bringing them into the bus, where people can look through them and check out a book. It has become a library.”
Festivals are held regularly on weekends so people can buy food and goods, and a portion of the money raised goes to the Love Fund, Moore noted.
