MOSES LAKE — The soup kitchen at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church in Moses Lake is once again open for the winter. The church offers hot lunches every Thursday starting at 10 a.m. on a first-come, first-serve basis, according to the church website.

Kim Helvy, one of the many volunteer cooks in the kitchen, said they started making hot lunches again at the beginning of September after limiting the menu to salads, sandwiches and other less preparation-intensive lunch items over the summer.

“Now we're back to making soup,” said Helvy. “There's always hot cocoa (and) coffee, and so people come in and they're greeted and then we just ask them to take a seat and then we bring them their meal.”

Helvy said they are now operating out of a brand new facility with a new kitchen after the church tore down the old building and built a new one at the beginning of the year.

“So everything's getting back into the swing of things,” said Helvy.

According to Our Lady of Fatima’s website, the soup kitchen has multiple teams that help with the lunches, including the kitchen team which prepares the soup and sandwich lunch and the clothing team, which sorts and sets out children’s and adult clothing, toys and occasionally household goods. The website also said that they also have a retired hairdresser who comes to the lunches every two weeks to give haircuts and shaves.

“And then also, we provide the use of our facilities,” said Helvy. “so if they need a shower. Then we have towels and the little hygiene packets with shampoo, deodorant, all those things. And sometimes we have people that have no food in their cupboard, and we will do a food basket where they'll put in things that are easy, you know a lot of canned soups and things like that.”

The kitchen also provides dessert, said Helvy.

“They like bread pudding,” she said.

Helvy said many people come in early to get coffee or hot cocoa and to visit with members of the community, including agencies aimed at helping that community, such as Renew.

“Other agencies sometimes ask if they can be here, so then people can talk to those resources,” Helvy said.

The kitchen doesn’t get as many people at the lunches during the summer as they do during the winter, said Helvy.

“I'd say we have 50 to 60 (lunches), 65 maybe, in the summer,” she said. “At the peak, we were doing like 200 lunches, before COVID.”

COVID forced the kitchen to stop offering the lunches for a while, said Helvy. However, she said now that the operations are pretty much back to normal, the lunches will bring in a wide variety of people.

“There are seniors,” said Helvy. “They're elderly and it's a place to come visit. We have parishioners that just come and visit other people here. We do get some of the homeless. They're the ones that will use the showers and things like that, but it's for anyone. I think on our flyer, it says, ‘If you’re lonely, if you're hungry, come.’”

Helvy said there is no one person in charge of the kitchen.

“I do the shopping and we set the menu and then everybody just comes and helps,” she said.

Another kitchen team member, Cleo Stevens, was the originator of the program, said Helvy.

Stevens said the program started around 2008.

“We've had it going for so long, you know, and then COVID,” said Stevens. “Then I reached an age where I passed it off to Kim.”

Stevens explained how the program went when it began.

“Everybody here kind of started it,” said Stevens. “We were all together since the beginning, basically … the first day we opened the soup kitchen we advertised in the paper and we advertised over radio and all over and we had 15 people come.”

Now the numbers usually reach the hundreds in the winter, said Stevens. The kitchen team said they will keep doing it as long as they can keep it up.

The kitchen’s purpose is entirely focused on service.

“If someone asks a question about our faith, our servers are willing to share, but we're not trying to convert people that come or anything like that,” said Helvy.

The church will continue offering lunches through May, according to their website.

Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com. Download the Columbia Basin Herald app on iOS and Android.