A woman in a red hijab and flowing yellow blouse carefully ladled chicken bathed in crackling oil into an industrial-size pot before smothering it with carrots, potatoes, cabbage and eggplant. Stirring vigorously, she sprinkled in seasonings until stovetop alchemy took hold and the mixture slowly turned into a fragrant stew.
The woman, Oumou Doumbouya, learned to cook this chicken-and-rice feast from her mother back in her West African homeland of Guinea and used to make it for birthdays and weddings. This time, she said, the special occasion was just being able to cook again. She arrived with her family in New York City in October 2022 after crossing the southern border, and the shelter where they stay does not have a kitchen she can use.
So she brought her cooking to the cramped kitchen in the basement of the Metro Baptist Church on West 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan. The hands-on kitchen is the magic behind a volunteer-run center that has helped thousands of migrants start over in the city. Called R.O.C.C. — for Resources, Opportunities, Connections, Community — the center opened a year ago and has been supported mainly with small donations from individuals and community and religious organizations.
Migrants from more than a dozen countries, including Venezuela, Honduras, Russia and Sudan, have worked side by side in the kitchen, taking as much joy and pride in their cooking as they do in sharing the flavors of their homelands with new friends. The center has created a close community that has become a counterpoint to the overflowing shelters, bureaucracy and anti-immigrant protests that have in part come to define the city’s migrant crisis.
“Anywhere you go in this world, you can create your own family,” said Ibrahima Sow, Ms. Doumbouya’s husband, who volunteers at the center every week.
More and more migrants are finding the center through word of mouth. They come for assistance with city ID cards, health insurance and immigration issues. They stay for the hot, fresh-made lunches served around banquet tables, the chance to cook in a kitchen where everyone is welcome and a respite — however brief — from the hardship and drudgery of their daily lives.
But now the center is struggling to stay open as its funding runs out. The small nonprofit organization that operates the center — Artists Athletes Activists — is a grass-roots advocacy group that waded into the migrant crisis with no paid employees, few financial resources and not much more than its members’ desires to do some good.
“Everything that comes in goes right out, that’s how we operate,” said Power Malu, a hip-hop artist and community activist who founded the group. “We don’t have the luxury to sit on any resources. We try to put them to use as soon as we have access to them.”
On the day she was making her stew, Ms. Doumbouya, 26, scooped up her 1-year-old daughter, Khadijatou, and swung her onto her back, expertly tying a baby blanket to keep her in place.
Ms. Doumbouya shared the double-wide stove with a 50-year-old Colombian woman and a 24-year-old Venezuelan woman who flipped arepas and patacones in a cast-iron pan while chatting excitedly in Spanish like old friends though they had just met.
Ms. Doumbouya, who does not speak Spanish, listened and smiled.
“It reminds me of my country where everybody is in the kitchen,” Ms. Doumbouya said later in French. “It’s part of the fun and the joy of sharing.”
While Ms. Doumbouya was cooking, Mr. Sow was upstairs welcoming migrants to the center. A compact man with a shaved head and goatee, Mr. Sow moved from table to table like a host greeting guests at a restaurant.
He shook hands and bumped fists. He asked how everyone was doing, switching easily from Spanish to French to English to Fulani, the language he spoke in Guinea. He speaks seven languages in all, including two more African languages, Susu and Mandinka, as well as Portuguese.
Mr. Sow, 40, and Ms. Doumbouya come from a large Muslim family in Dubréka, a town in western Guinea. His late father, who owned a tailor shop, had four wives and 14 children. The couple had worked for the family business.
Mr. Sow moved to Brazil in 2016 and found a job at a chicken-processing plant. He eventually saved enough money to bring over Ms. Doumbouya and their older daughter, Makhissa, now 7, to spare her from genital mutilation, an accepted practice in Guinea.
In 2022, they joined the migrants heading to the U.S.-Mexico border. Ms. Doumbouya was pregnant at the time. They did not have family members in the United States and came to New York because of its Guinean community. Khadijatou was born in the city at Bellevue Hospital.
As the tables filled up with migrants, Mr. Sow took a break to check on Ms. Doumbouya and Khadijatou in the kitchen. In Guinea, his wife cooked every day and he missed her food. “That’s why I’m not fat,” he said. “I’m supposed to be bigger than this.”
Mr. Sow said his family was staying in their fifth city shelter. Every time they have to move, he said, it disrupts their lives and they have to leave behind shoes, clothing and toys because they cannot carry everything. He is not a fan of the spaghetti and meatloaf served at the shelters, either.
At the center, he does not have to worry about any of that. He stays all day and translates for other migrants. Though he is in a church, he prays with other Muslims on mats in the basement. Some days, he fasts for his religion while everyone else is eating.
“Here I feel comfortable,” he said. “I feel like I’m home and I’m able to help other people.”
As the aroma of the chicken stew wafted through the center, Rachel Tigay, a volunteer who runs the kitchen, asked Ms. Doumbouya how much longer it would take. Ms. Doumbouya looked confused. “French, right,” Ms. Tigay said. She pulled out her phone and typed: “I want to serve the food at 12:30” into Google translate.
Ms. Doumbouya looked and pointed to a bag of rice that still had to be cooked.
The migrants in the kitchen make more than 100 lunches a day on a tight budget of roughly $250, which also has to cover ground coffee, milk, muffins and cookies. Ms. Tigay, a former high school social worker who loves to cook herself, plans the meals, shops for ingredients and recruits other cooks for the kitchen.
The center grew out of community efforts to welcome migrants arriving in the city on buses in 2022. It is a partnership between Artists Athletes Activists and Rauschenbusch Metro Ministries, a nonprofit founded by the church that donates its space in the building, staff hours and office supplies. The two groups have a close working relationship, which has allowed for the center to operate smoothly in a shared space and is reflected in the warm and inclusive feel of the place.
But money has become increasingly tight. The center runs two days a week, serving up to 300 people. It has been unable to expand to a third day and recently had to pause a popular giveaway of diapers, strollers and car seats until there was money to buy more. “We’re at a place where we’re stuck because we’re not able to do more because we’re all volunteers,” Mr. Malu said. “We don’t know what tomorrow will hold.”
Artists Athletes Activists has raised about $150,000 in donations since 2022, which includes a $25,000 grant last year from the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, a city-run nonprofit that partners with donors. Mr. Malu said the group had spent the money on all its activities, including Uber and Lyft rides for migrants arriving at local airports and a soccer club for migrant children. He said that Artists Athletes Activists did not have the capacity to go through the application process for a city contract to provide services to migrants.
But the organization has been exploring other ways to raise money, Mr. Malu added, including asking artists and photographers to donate their work for a charity auction, and fielding a team of runners in the New York City Marathon for a fund-raising campaign.
Since the center does not have its own space at the church, it had to temporarily shift its hours and operations this month to work around a summer camp. Last Wednesday, the center did not open until midafternoon. There was not enough time to cook meals so cheap pizzas were ordered.
But two days later, the kitchen was bustling again. Anyone who wants to cook can, no culinary skills required. The food is more homestyle than fancy. The desserts, however, are another story.
Jean Rodriguez bakes scrumptious pan piñita, tres leches cake and cinnamon rolls from a notebook of handwritten recipes that he carried from Venezuela through the Darién Gap. He keeps the notebook swaddled in white linen, carefully unwrapping it in the kitchen.
Mr. Rodriguez, 51, said he did not know anyone when he arrived in New York in December and soon became depressed sitting around a shelter. “When I’m alone, I start thinking, Why did I come here?” he said.
Mr. Rodriguez got the address of the center from another migrant because he needed winter clothes. But he found hope and renewed purpose in the kitchen. He had cooked in restaurants in Venezuela for more than two decades. In New York, he works nights cleaning hospital floors.
He was tired one recent morning after a fight broke out at his shelter in Queens and kept him up all night. But when he tied on an apron, he was soon lost in creating a coconut cake with butter, condensed milk, cinnamon sticks and a dozen egg yolks, improvising at times without a blender or baking tools.
Though his recipe calls for rum, he left it out, conscious of Muslim migrants who do not consume alcohol. When he finished, everyone gathered around as he cut the cake.
Mr. Rodriguez and a half-dozen other migrants have become regulars in the kitchen, showing up every week. Others like Ms. Doumbouya drop in when they can, in between jobs, English-language classes and child care.
Ms. Tigay is like a second mom to several of the younger migrants who cook with her. Ms. Tigay, who is Jewish, hosted Christmas Eve dinner for them at her home in the West Village with a tree decorated with flags from Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador and Honduras.
Ms. Tigay saves food in the kitchen for Mr. Sow when he is fasting. They like to talk about food and family. They have never talked about politics or the war in Israel. “That’s bigger than us,” Mr. Sow said.
Now, some of Mr. Sow’s closest friends are from the center. He volunteers alongside Alejandro Sanchez, 28, a migrant from Venezuela. They call to check on each other and take their children on play dates.
Mr. Sow said he left one family behind in Guinea only to find another in New York. He and Ms. Doumbouya and their daughters celebrated Independence Day riding the carousel in Central Park with Ms. Tigay and watching fireworks with other migrants from the center along the Hudson River.
“I have a big family here also,” he said.
The post Migrants Find Joy and a Taste of Home in a Manhattan Church Kitchen appeared first on New York Times.
