Due to a pre-arranged dental appointment, I arrived slightly late at the food bank today. During the drive from the surgery in Briz, as us Bristolians call Brislington, I prepared myself for a hall full of desperate people, with my colleagues trying to keep up with demand. I would throw myself into it and together we would clear the backlog. I parked up, entered the church hall where we are based and … no one was waiting. And that was how it stayed for the rest of the day.
No one knows why we were so quiet. I wondered if it might be an act of God, following Rishi Sunak’s reading from Matthew 25 at yesterday’s 75th birthday celebration of the NHS. It read: “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food“. But there is no evidence that neither Sunak nor God have given anyone food since yesterday afternoon. Perhaps a lot of our monthly paid service users still have some wages left or others have had their benefits from the DWP. Although there were far fewer callers than usual, the stories were just as sad and distressing.
I saw one woman who lived in a shared house with people she didn’t know. When she was at work, doing a long shift, someone – she has no idea who – stole all her food. In the future, she may have to store all her food in her room for fear of it happening again, so no fresh food and perishables. But we don’t have the facilities to give out fresh food so the tins and packets we issued will be piled next to her bed. What a life.
We had the stats through for June this week and in our area of Bristol – I won’t say which, but it’s not east, west or south – we gave out 671 three day emergency food parcels weighing 15349 kilos which supported 1517 people. I’m not able to work out from the raw statistics whether or not this was a particularly busy month, but my feeling is it wasn’t. The catastrophic utility bills of winter have given way to that time of year when heating is not normally needed, except for certain groups of people like the chronically sick and disabled. For the people who use food banks, this is a temporary respite. It won’t be long before the nights start closing in and the struggle just to survive resumes.
We closed bang on time, at 3.00pm, for what was possibly the first time since I started volunteering. We put the chairs and tables away, vacuumed the floor, locked everything up and said goodbye to each other until the next time. If I’d been on a salary, I’d have felt inclined to hand it back, so little did I contribute to the fight against food poverty, but as I’m not I suppose I should feel pleased that not so many people needed to come and see us today.
