Inside the walls of Second Presbyterian Church in downtown Little Rock, they are handing out kindness, warm meals and medical care.
The people who frequent the stewpot are homeless or down on their luck. Rachel White, a community nurse educator says she has gotten to know many of these people well. " I have people who have been business owners, directors of companies, CEOs, doctors, lawyers. Something happened and I found that most of them that go out and are classified as homeless they stay there. They don't go back in. I guess because they don't have to deal with the daily life situations."
Although one of those daily situations they have no choice but to face is illness. That's why once a month different doctors like Doctor Blake Scheer from Baptist Health, and once a week, nurses and pharmacists volunteer their time at the stewpot clinic. "I'm here for a couple of hours to see patients who request to see a physician." Says Doctor Scheer. "I see you know a lot of the regular run of the mill things, colds and aches and pains and things like that."
Donald Charles is one of Scheer's patients. He has high blood pressure. It was first diagnosed here at the clinic. "Because I don't have any ways of maintaining monitoring my blood pressure see and once I get on blood pressure I have to keep it checked. But I have no way of checking it. So if I come here once a week, the nurses are here and I can check, so I got my blood pressure checked today."
Donald has to come back to the clinic once a month to get a refill of his meds. Scott pace, the pharmacist at the clinic says they are lucky to have most of their pharmaceuticals donated. "Patients are able to come back to the clinic and see Scheer on a monthly basis to get a refill of their prescriptions and in fact we have a number of patients that have high blood pressure that come back pretty regularly to get their drugs refilled."
For the people like Scott who work at this clinic, the hours they donate are paid with something much more important than money. "It's really very little to give and you get a whole lot in return."