Curryent Affairs

Despite Monday the 5th of June kicked-off the volunteering week, a couple of regular volunteers at Ealing Soup Kitchen were missing, and Emma found gaps in her June rota to fill with GoodGym crew members. The first two hours (or even longer!) were covered by Madhan and Steph.

At 6 pm Sevan came running to pick up Madhan's duties. Both spent some time in a knowledge-sharing session at the takeaway counter until Kash showed up to swap with Stephane. Sevan stayed at the food service post, alongside (ir)regular volunteer Marvin (more known as a City Harvest hero) and Kash joined Matt at the frontline, learning the secrets of crowd control. The second GoodGym shift had still lots of clients in the fast-moving queue but Sevan and Kash were quickly picking up new skills on the job.

Sevan was encouraging the clients to choose eggs instead of meat to save the latter for those who would come later, while Kash was dealing with distinguishing the word eggs from ex(-military) uttered by one of the clients. Today's hot meal was a veggie one, lentil curry, later replaced in the menu with an emergency orzo pasta curry with chickpeas and tomatoes. There were lots of characters in the queue to takeaway, some were familiar faces to the GoodGymers. The crowd seemed more picky than usual, with clients returning snack bars not to their liking. Those who weren't early birds had to come to terms with the service eventually running out of shopping bags and accept the tea bags and meat instead. A few latecomers though had a choice of an extra hot meal or Pret sandwiches salvaged by Mark from Feeding Ealing.

The queue was slowly dying out, with one or two clients coming at a time, so Matt and Kash could relax. Matt shared his stories about his most challenging shifts at the Soup Kitchen. Tonight was pretty easygoing, without incidents, maybe apart from Kash handling the client's dog and being called a mad woman and Matt having to deal with minors in the queue. Despite our love for Soup Kitchen, it is a bit like a nightclub: not safe for children. Matt asked Kash whether she was ok staying in the front as the only bouncer and went inside to create a new A-frame sign that would be clearer about the service being for the homeless and not for parents bringing their children with them. The result was a piece of art but no one managed to take a photo of Matt with his creation.

Close to 8 pm Sevan's and Kash's ears started picking up noises of Henry the Hoover sucking the air out of the vacuum bags used to store donated clothes. They felt happy not sorting nakd bars or squeezing the garments into the cupboard this time - that task will definitely catch up with them next time!