Hope.

On Friday afternoon I attended the graduation of the students in the SVdP culinary program. It’s a 12-week program that teaches students to cook and hopefully prepares them for employment in other professional kitchens. The graduation was the culmination of a lot of hard work and it was clearly a very emotional and joyous occasion for the students who invited their family and friends and cooked quite a feast. The keynote speaker, Christophe Kubiak, the executive chef at La Bonne Cuisine, was especially well-chosen. He talked about moving to the U.S. from France in 1993 with only the proverbial $2 in his pocket and the idea of a better life.

On a personal note, I found out that Chef Michael, who runs the culinary program, also went to Indiana University. His time there was slightly more star-crossed than mine, swimming with Mark Spitz and also winning a gold-medal. I didn’t get the impression that he’s a die-hard Hoosier basketball fan like me, and he also wasn’t a huge fan of Bloomington with its lack of ocean and all, but the one thing we did agree upon was Nick’s English Hut. For those that don’t know, Nick’s is probably the greatest college bar in all of America, at least in my opinion. We ended up spending a few minutes talking about their Stromboli and he artfully described each ingredient from the crumbled sausage, pizza sauce, cheese and even the bun with meticulous detail in the way only a chef could. Apparently the real key to the Stromboli is the 500-degree oven that they use.

Back to things that matter--on Thursday night I watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. It was pretty amazing to see 75,000 people pack Invesco Field just to see a politician. It is clear that he’s a captivating figure and maybe even the “biggest celebrity on the planet,” but I think what makes him truly unique is his ability to inspire the common man. In the men’s center I talked to one guy and he told me that all week he’d been tuning into the convention on his radio. The significance of Obama’s speech forty-five years to the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” was certainly not lost upon him—it was a promise renewed.

As Jesuit Volunteers I feel like many of us are dropped into positions we’re not prepared for, working with marginalized populations we have little experience with and facing problems that have no easy solutions. It’s easy to get discouraged and overwhelmed when dealing with poverty and homelessness, so it was especially heartening to see the tangible proof that SVdP really is making a difference in the lives of its clients. Chef Christophe Kubiak impressed upon the students that in order to become successful they must do everything in their lives, especially cooking, with passion. Not all of the students are going to become executive chefs, but the very fact that it is now a possibility to be explored is inspiring.

I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned so far is that, for staff and clients alike, the value of hope should never be discounted.