On Tuesday, as the D.C. government pulled the drawstring tighter around the city—mandating the closure of all nonessential businesses amid a strict social distancing period—Benito Bonilla was out on the same Columbia Heights street corner as always.

In the early afternoon, he laid out his wares: soda, water, clothes, perfume. He wrapped a cloth around his nose and mouth, donned a pair of gloves, and stood in the cold for four hours, knowing all the while that he shouldn’t. No one bought anything from the 67-year-old sidewalk vendor, who has been selling these items on this same corner for 15 years.

“If it were up to me, I wouldn’t go out,” Bonilla tells DCist in Spanish. “It’s a risk. But what else am I going to do?”

Bonilla is a senior suffering from a chronic liver disease and diabetes. He knows about the new coronavirus, which has spread around the world with alarming speed, killing thousands. He knows that, as an older person with underlying medical conditions, he is particularly vulnerable. But desperation pushes him out to his corner twice a week, four hours at a time, trying to make a few dollars for basic necessities and his overdue light bill.

“I’m here out of necessity,” he says. “I get retirement money, but it doesn’t cover everything.”

Bonilla normally sells on this corner with several other people, who hawk everything from atol de elote to tamales to pupusas to clothing. None of them are coming out anymore.

D.C. is home to dozens of sidewalk vendors like Bonilla, the large majority of whom have stopped selling in recent weeks as the coronavirus outbreak has gripped the city. Many have no other income. Because they work in the informal economy, they do not qualify for unemployment benefits, making them particularly vulnerable during the current crisis.

“They’ve been so exposed through the nature of their work and the cruelty of our society that has forced them out of the formal economy,” says Megan Macareg of Many Languages One Voice, an advocacy organization that works with street vendors. “They’re some of the most vulnerable workers you could possibly find.”

Even after the virus arrived to the city earlier this month, things didn’t look quite so bleak for the vendors. At first, it seemed like they might have found a unique solution to the economic problem of social distancing and the physical dangers of the virus.

The week of March 9, as D.C. confirmed its first cases of COVID-19 and offices everywhere began requiring employees to work from home, a unique plan took shape: turn street vendors into health ambassadors, giving them hand sanitizer and informational materials to hand out to passersby and paying them a stipend to make up for the loss in sales. For a short time, organizers succeeded in paying a group of ten vendors to do this.

But as the days have worn on and the number of cases in the city has risen sharply, they’ve had to abandon the plan, says Macareg, who took charge of the effort.

“I bought 110 pounds of glycerin on March 11 so we could start making and handing out more hand sanitizer to people,” she says. Macareg also bought some personal protective equipment at Home Depot, like masks and gloves, to hand out to the vendors. “And then I just couldn’t get ahead of it,” she says, her voice breaking. “I couldn’t get ahead of it.”

As things got worse, Macareg told the vendors to go home. She was worried that, even taking every precaution, they were too exposed, and they were exposing other people. She decided to donate the equipment she bought to a hospital.

“If people see street vendors out there handing out sanitizer, they’re not going to shelter at home. I can’t be part of the problem,” she says. “But that means I also feel the responsibility of helping them live.”

With the help of money raised via a mutual aid network and other organizers, Macareg has been giving out $100 Visa gift cards to vendors. It’s a huge organizing push, one that Macareg says has felt overwhelming at times. But she’s managed to hand out several gift cards already, helping vendors buy groceries and other necessities.

That includes 62-year-old Colochita, the self-proclaimed grandmother of the Columbia Heights street vendors, who first started hawking mangoes in the area more than 20 years ago. The gift cards have been her only income since she decided to stop selling last week, and they may be her only income for the foreseeable future.

Colochita—whose legal name is Maria Isabel Guevarra—has been staying at home with two of her grandchildren, who are five and seven years old. When she answered the phone on Tuesday, the din of their cartoons and chatter was audible in the background. I asked her how she was doing, and she immediately blurted, “I’m okay, but we can’t go out to sell.”

Colochita started selling less often about three weeks ago, she says, already fearing the virus she kept hearing people talk about. The last time she tried to go out was Friday, and she sold almost nothing. “After that I stayed in, because I’m risking my life,” she says.

On Friday, Colochita will owe money on a loan. She doesn’t have it. Her daughter, who is employed by a cleaning company, is still going out to jobs, but the relief of her income is eclipsed by worry that she’ll catch the virus and bring it home.

“I have all my bills left to pay. We are screwed. We will see what I do,” Colochita says. “We have to ask God, because he’s the only one with the solution. We have to ask him to stop this disease so that everyone can go back to work. Let’s see what my God says.”

She is quiet for several moments. “I don’t know what to do,” she says. “I don’t know what to do.”

Milca Ariza-Ramos, a 42-year-old street vendor who sells tamales and atol de elote in Petworth, says she’s in a similar spot.

This week, she dipped into her emergency savings and used $80 to buy groceries, she says. She’s been trying to go through the food slowly, to make it last and stretch her resources. She still has a little bit more money saved, she says, but it won’t last long.

“The truth is that this is difficult for us, the vendors,” she says. “Being without work is difficult, even though one always tries to act strong. You do it for your kids so they don’t see you so sad.”

Ariza-Ramos hasn’t been out to sell since March 14, she says. The day before, she’d gone to Walmart to buy mangoes to sell in the afternoon, anticipating sunny weather. She found the place jam packed with people buying so much food and supplies, she started to worry that she’d missed the notice of a snow storm.

It wasn’t until later that she understood it was because of the virus, she says. Her last day out, she sold less than half of her wares, which was when she really started to worry.

Now, she’s relying on some extra money she can earn sewing and repairing people’s clothing, but it isn’t enough to live off of.

She’s not sure what will happen if too many weeks pass without work, but she says there’s no use panicking—she’s taking each day as it comes.

“I’m just hoping to God,” Ariza-Ramos says. “I have faith in God.”