When you're homeless your feet take a beating. That was the simple fact behind the idea to provide a foot washing service.

KRISTI HEIM

Volunteers washed and massaged peoples' feet at a United Way event on Sept. 11, the first National Day of Service and Remembrance.

People approached a section of folding chairs inside Qwest Field and gradually began to sit down and take off their shoes. Volunteers brought over warm water in clear plastic boxes.

One man's feet were so frost bitten from last winter that it hurt too much to brush them with a towel. Another man asked a volunteer to recite the little piggy nursery rhyme on his toes. A third said it was the first time another human being had touched him in months.

KRISTI HEIM

Candice Mooneyham gets her hair done during a volunteer event to help homeless and low-income people get basic services free of charge.

The United Way organizers hoped last Friday's event, which included hot meals and dozens of free basic services, could narrow the divide between people with homes and people without them, at least for a day. A wrenching year of layoffs and foreclosures had already pushed many of the housed into the other camp.

The activity also held a deeper spiritual dimension for volunteers like John Fergueson, an Episcopal priest from Kenmore. The Christian tradition is based on Jesus washing the feet of the Apostles, turning a menial task for servants into a lesson about humility.

"It's a way of acting on the solidarity of all people," he said. "The face of homelessness is different now. People are much more like us than not like us."

The community event drew 1,200 people, including the newly homeless: young people without jobs. People like Candice Mooneyham or Mike Schreck who didn't even look poor but had been sleeping on the street and in parks.

KRISTI HEIM

People approached the foot washing station tentatively at first but eventually filled all the seats.

Mooneyham, 39, who came from Spokane and before that from Oregon in search of work, said she had slept outside under a bridge in downtown Seattle the day before.

"I have never in my life seen so many homeless around," she said. "I'm not really scared, but it's not something I hope to do a lot longer."

Mike Schreck, 42, who is now living in a Queen Anne shelter, said he dreaded the winter months when he will have to compete for a bed with men who have been living outside all summer. The unemployed waiter said social services are overwhelmed by people with drug and alcohol problems, while there's little help for those who just need work.

"As it gets worse more and more people who are economically depressed are going to be shocked at the treatment they will get," he said. "As the job situation gets worse there are going to be a lot more of those people."

People waited in line from dawn until the doors opened at 9 a.m. Some information booths hardly had a visitor. But hundreds of people, including a woman with her middle-aged mother and her baby in a stroller, stood in a line stretching around the inside of the building to a room where they could pick out a few items of clothing and get a new backpack. After a few hours organizers ran out of clothing and had to turn people away.