Capacity To Care...
Someone once said “the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.” Despite being ruled by an uncaring elite focused on greed and personal gain, we live in a caring community of generous souls.
Every week we see some of that generosity at our kitchen. Last week a person seeing the queue of people in need came to the table and emptied his wallet – maybe a hundred pounds. As we are not registered to collect money on the street we couldn’t accept his donation, but his kindness touched us.
This week a man pushing a buggy, with his young son walking past our gazebo stopped at the Reflection table. He spent a few minutes picking up some frames detailing the injustice in our society, reading some passages of peoples personal experiences of living under austerity, and reflecting, before moving on. A little later they returned with some fruit they had just bought from the supermarket, the young child learning from his father the importance of giving, neatly laid out the fruit on our table for those in need to take. It always uplifts our spirit when we see such acts of generosity. Thank you kind souls.
Tins
We have been reviewing tinned items this week. Our recent introduction of sliced peach tins, which replaced the unpopular spaghetti hoops, seems to be a hit with our guests. Any other suggestions, please let us know either through the contact page here, or by talking to one of our volunteers.
We’ve noticed that in general we are running out of tins before we close, so from next week we will nearly double the quantity of tins we bring to the kitchen and monitor how that works out.
Reflection Table
Our Reflection Table has been garnering a lot of interest recently, which is very important for us. If you have read our article ‘the problem with food banks‘ you will understand that one of the core aims of the Resistance Kitchen is to educate the public on the causes of hunger and poverty in our community so they can reflect on what the solutions might be.
Food banks, whilst unfortunately needed, can never solve the problem of hunger, as hunger is a product of poverty which is a product of social injustice in our society – something food banks don’t touch. Someone once said “homelessness exists because billionaires exist”. As the injustice in society increases, the gap between the haves and the have nots widens – we see extreme poverty and extreme wealth side-by-side. Systemic change is required to narrow that gap, not food.
Dolls
Recently we added a display to the Reflection Table highlighting how systemic racism impacts communities in our borough of Croydon. The exhibit titled “To fight hunger, to fight poverty, you have to fight systemic racism”, we had two dolls, one white, one black. They were holding a 3 page flip book, speech bubbles on each page highlighting how different aspects of poverty impacts each child. So the first page looked at life expectancy, how living in a predominantly black/asian area of our borough cut your life expectancy by over 10 years compared to living in a predominantly white area just a mile a half up the road. The other pages looked at how child poverty and homelessness disproportionately impacts black/asian people in Croydon. You can read about the display here:
I noticed a black woman seeing the table make a beeline to the doll exhibit. She spent a while looking at the dolls but didn’t flip the page to see the other two examples of systemic racism. I remember thinking at the time when I made the display, that perhaps I should include a ‘please turn page’ instruction on each page in case people didn’t realise there were more pages. So I approached the lady and explained the display and showed her the pages turn to reveal more. She replied “oh that’s very interesting..” paused, then added “but I thought the dolls were for sale.. I wanted to buy the black one”. Mortified, I looked up and we both laughed.
Other Interesting Posts:
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 40
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 38
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 37
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 13
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 11
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 9
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 8
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 7
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 6
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 4
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 3
Resistance Kitchen Update – Week 2