cooking with love

every time i recalled this incident, it always bring tears in my eyes:

it happened on one sunday morning many many months ago when justin and i were still volunteering for Food Not Bombs KL (FNBKL). we were selling second hand clothes outside the cathedral church in bukit nanas to raise some money for the food program, we saw a homeless man limping across the road, we recognised that he sometimes comes and eat at our weekly serving. he was wearing a torn black pants and bare-footed. justin picked a pair of good pants from our on-sale pile and went over and offered it to him, he took the pants from justin, looked down at the new pants in his hands and gestured `thank you' and waved at me from across the road and walked away very slowly, then it happened, he cried. he just started crying and pushing tears away as we walked.

we also cried.

the one-year with FNBKL is unforgettable. many friends have heard me talking about it but i guess very few actually know what the work is like...

few of us start work in the morning on sundays, justin and i would sell clothes outside the church (same place where the serving will take place in the evening), riding on the sunday mass crowd. our customers were mostly philipino maids who hang out on sundays in town. few other volunteers would visit a few selected wet markets in town and collect donations of scraps, unsold vegetables, potatoes, fruits, etc. the cash raised from the `morning jumble sale' will go to buy rice, oil, onions and other cooking ingredients that we can't get for free.

the cooking will take place round 2pm in a place aptly called University Bangsar Utama (UBU) where activists conduct free tuition classes for the kids in the neighbourhood, hold discussion groups, etc. volunteers who are mainly underground musicians, university students, grown-up bohemians and back-packers would come to help with the massive cooking in the tiny kitchen of UBU.

round 5:40pm the food will get transported to the serving pad. by 6pm we would have a long line of people queuing for their dinner. the dinner usually consist of one soup dish, a stir-fried vegetable, rice, fruits and water.

i remember befriending a lonely old lady from the church. she told me she lived in this cheap room in puduraya area, she visits the church twice on sunday. Mary Anne was her name. she must have been really lonely because every week she would come round and talked to me, telling me to wear clogs when i do the dish-washing so i don't soak my feet in wet slippers; telling me to eat more because she thought i was under weight. sometimes she would take the food we offered but other times she just spent about half an hour there just hanging with us.

then there this feisty young woman called Letchumi, she was about the only female who came to eat every week. she was very vocal and argumentative, picking fights with the men was no surprise in our weekly routine. she got pregnant short while after i got to know her, then she disappeared for a few weeks. when she came back again for food she told us the baby was safe and she was looking to work regularly. i didn't see her after but i bumped into her once late at night in bangsar baru, she was begging i think. the last i saw her (which i can't remember when) she has put on weight and well-groomed, said she got a good job in perak and she was earning a good living as family help or some sort.

the reason why i left them was i was thinking too much about the real impact i was making in the lives of the homeless. to me, FNBKL was only doing as far as one meal can go. i was not happy with just feeding them one meal in a week. some friends said i was helping them to stay homeless by giving them free food instead of getting them real work. some friends thought it is wrong to feed the addicts who are also petty thieves.

many of them were dying from AIDs and other diseases. we tried helping a few of them but most of the time they went back to drugs and their old lives. some of them disappeared from the weekly serving after we got to know them, then later we found out they died.

some of us might have experience with `soup kitchen' from overseas. i hope FNBKL can get as big as those soup kitchens.

FNBKL
http://www.fnbkl.cjb.net/