Homeless people in Gainesville got a free meal Thursday that has long been a grade-school lunch tradition: good old peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
The PB&J came courtesy of the Catholic Gators club at UF.
Students made more than 1,000 sandwiches Wednesday night for the organization's "PB and Jesus" event to give to the homeless the following day.
More than 200 sandwiches were given on Thursday morning to St. Francis House, a homeless shelter and soup kitchen in Gainesville.
Eight students ventured out with the Catholic Gators' campus minister, Debby Cherwak, at noon on Thursday to hand out as many of the remaining sandwiches as they could to homeless people around town.
They visited Bo Diddley Community Plaza and a tent city in Gainesville, distributing sandwiches to everyone they met.
"We're all in love with Jesus. They always say, ‘When I was hungry, you gave me food,'" said Amanda Edwards, a 21-year-old UF senior who went on the outing. "We're serving him by serving others."
The students split up to cover as much of the tent city area as they could, handing out sandwiches to the people they met and leaving some food behind for people to distribute to others later in the day.
One makeshift house made of wooden boards nailed together and covered with tarps and towels was empty when a few of the students walked over, calling for anyone inside to come out and get a free PB&J.
The students left a few sandwiches there in case people returned to the site that night.
Kathryn Stolarz, 22, graduated from UF in Spring 2011 and has been a member of Catholic Gators since her freshman year. She had never visited a tent city before.
Feeding the homeless was the issue at the center of a controversy in Gainesville that raged for more than a year as people argued about whether the city should continue to enforce a meal limit that restricted soup kitchens and shelters from feeding more than 130 people per day.
The Gainesville City Commission eliminated this restriction Aug. 18, replacing it with a time limit that allows organizations to provide food for no more than three continuous hours per day.
Stolarz said she didn't agree with the idea of a meal limit on feeding the homeless.
"I don't think anyone should ever be limited to the amount that they should give," she said. "It doesn't make sense to me to stop people from helping other people."
After the students left the tent city, they took the remaining sandwiches to the Bread of the Mighty Food Bank in Gainesville, Cherwak said.
They donated 144 pounds of PB&J to the organization. The food bank then sent the food to the Reichert House Youth Academy, a nonprofit organization in Gainesville that supports at-risk boys in middle and high school.
