In a rundown section of southeast Washington, D.C., amid windowless brick warehouses sits a storefront whose bright green canvas awning beckons from a distance. In a previous incarnation, it served as a carpentry shop to restore furniture for the White House. Now the building houses a peripatetic and high-spirited troupe of miracle workers.

The minute you pass through the double sliding glass doors, your eyes and your nose will tell you what the two principal ingredients of that miracle are: food and friends. A modern, immense kitchen all but swallows the landscape. In the crowded lobby in front of it, a rainbow coalition of volunteers coalesce in a common sense of purpose. Brown grocery bags are stacked on cart for their final destination: to a growing number of people with AIDS and their families scattered across a broad swath of the metropolitan area.

The United States capital ranks fifth nationally among cities in numbers of people with AIDS. "Unfortunately, for many people in this city," says Craig Shniderman, a former social worker, "AIDS is part of a compendium of problems they face. The various aspects of living in poverty compound the problems of AIDS, and AIDS compounds the problem of their poverty."

Shniderman should know; today he is the Executive Director of Food & Friends, the country's third-largest AIDS community kitchen (after organizations in San Francisco and New York), and many of his clients live at or below the poverty level.

Research shows that between 60% and 80% of all AIDS-related deaths in the U.S. are associated with undernutrition. Those with AIDS fight a three-fold nutritional battle: an inability to eat enough food, difficulty absorbing ingested nutrients, and poor metabolism. Furthermore, recent studies have shown the importance of nutritional intervention before undernutrition occurs, since proper nutrition, as Shniderman points out, "is a potent weapon against the many opportunistic infections threatening those with HIV."

Food & Friends seeks to fight the hidden hunger of HIV/AIDS. The old proverb "We should eat to live, not live to eat," takes on added meaning for this group, since the will and ability to eat properly must be carefully nurtured. "It is Food & Friends' intention to improve the quality of life of the people we serve by teaching them how to stay well-nourished in facing the challenges of HIV/AIDS," Shniderman emphasizes.

To do this, Food & Friends provides, on a daily basis, freshly prepared, nutritious meals at no cost to almost 500 homebound people with AIDS and their families living within a 750-square-mile area of the Washington metropolitan area. It also offers individualized nutritional assessments and counseling by an on-staff registered dietician, nutrition and HIV educational materials and workshops, and cooking classes for people with HIV/AIDS and their caregivers. Through its Groceries To Go program, created in November 1995 to respond to the needs of those living outside the delivery area, some 120 clients receive three shopping bags of groceries and frozen entrees--enough to get them through until the next week's delivery.

Currently, 37 paid staff work in the areas of client services, kitchen and delivery operations, the volunteer program, and community outreach. The 700 volunteers all receive special training and soon learn lesson number one: no wasted motions. Chefs begin work at 5 a.m., kitchen volunteers start arriving at 7:30 a.m., packing volunteers arrive at 9:00 a.m., and drivers head off at 11:00 a.m. Meals are delivered by six Food & Friends vans to 13 distribution centers, which in turn serve 75 delivery routes throughout the area. By 2:00 p.m., all clients have received that day's lunch and dinner, and breakfast for the next morning.

The idea for Food & Friends was born in 1988, when a handful of concerned parishioners and Carla Gorrell, minister of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Washington, provided the start-up funds, and 21 restaurants donated meals to feed housebound people with AIDS. Within a year, Food & Friends was operating out of the church's basement, where it had claimed the kitchen, office, and storage space. As word of the service spread, the operation spilled over into basement passageways, and the administrative offices were chased off-site. Lack of storage space limited menu options and hampered the ability to accept donations of canned and dry goods. During its Westminster tenure, Food & Friends' client base grew from 30 to more than 400; as many as 1,275 meals were being prepared and packaged each day in the overcrowded kitchen. "We had come to the place where our clients' needs had surpassed what that facility could support," says Shniderman, "and the choice became whether to stay small and limit our service, or make a leap into the future."

The decision to relocate in July 1995 to a new 12,500-square-foot kitchen, classroom, storage, and office facility tailored to its needs will help Food & Friends keep pace with a stark reality: its client base has doubled every year. One volunteer-turned-client described the new building as "bright and cheerful," but added: "It's also a sad reminder that the problem isn't going away; it's getting bigger and bigger."

There are currently more than 30,000 HIV-positive people in the Washington area who eventually will need health care. For this reason, Food & Friends is determined to remain flexible in how it provides its services. One change has been the shift in attention away from just the parent or child with AIDS toward preservation of the whole family by delivering enough meals to feed everyone in the household, as this becomes necessary. "This way," explains Shniderman, "we don't have mothers who are ill going without meals in order to feed their children or an elderly live-in parent." Another cardinal rule is to make the client's relationship with Food & Friends as helpful and uncomplicated as possible. New clients, following the initial intake interview, can expect to receive their first meal delivery within 24 hours. A delivery change is as simple as a phone call: in one recent case, a client's child was admitted to the hospital, and the mother was able to take her meals at the child's bedside. Above all, Food & Friends staff and volunteers are encouraged to "remember the little things," such as sending cakes and cards to clients on their birthdays. Says Fay Slattery, Director of Client and Volunteer Services: "It's as much about friends as it is about food. Both have healing powers."

Volunteers make deliveries to gentrified townhouses in the Dupont Circle and Adams-Morgan area, suburban high-rise apartment buildings, public housing units, and dilapidated rooming houses. They reach men, women, and children of every race, age, and cultural background. Regardless of their differences, all clients share a sustained optimism that a cure for AIDS will be found in the near future.

Undoubtedly, the volunteers themselves are Food & Friends' most valuable component. The estimated value of their donated time during 1996 is US$ 925,000. Another big dollar earner is the annual 250-mile Philadelphia-DC AIDS Ride bicycling event, which netted US$ 782,000 in 1996. Financing is also received through federal government emergency relief funds to support HIV services in U.S. localities hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic. The funding base is diverse. Response comes in the form of foundation grants, donations from corporations and community and religious groups, and from individuals through memorial gifts, community campaigns, special events, direct mail, collection cans placed in area businesses, and special giving programs.

"The steady increase in the number of people we serve challenges us in every imaginable way," says Shniderman. "For this reason, we take no small comfort in the compassionate response of the community."

"People are fighting to maintain their health and independence. It's a fight that, with your help, we hope to win."