I know that in many professions, people can become immune, or perhaps semi-detached, from the work they were doing. Surgeons carrying out complex life-saving procedures, police officers dealing with grotesque sexual abuse cases and armed forces personnel active on the battlefield. They all see things no human being would want to see but somehow, in order to do their jobs properly, they have to put their emotions to one side. In a far smaller way, volunteers at the Melchester food bank also get to see things we would rather not see and they affect us. Frankly, I would be more concerned if they didn’t.
Once we have finished our weekly shift at the Melchester food bank, under the shadows of the local football ground belonging to Melchester Rovers, I am fond of saying, “Well, we really earned our wages today!” And so we did, especially today, when you would need a heart of stone not to be moved by what we saw and heard about.
We see any number of homeless people, ranging from those who have absolutely nowhere to go and those who are permanently sofa-surfing. And it is hard not to be moved by it, particularly when one of the people asks if we can find them a sleeping bag and some nail clippers. Of course, we can’t. Our donations are of food and toiletries. We’re the end of the line for those in food poverty and absolute poverty. All we can do is offer is ‘sign-posting’, which to my ears sounds a lot like meaningless business-speak. It isn’t, of course, but there is no one stop shop for homelessness and poverty. Worse still, lots of people don’t seem to care.
At Christmas, donations to food banks increase and other organisations spring into action in order to make the festive season special for those with little or nothing. After Christmas, donations start to fall and the other organisations return to hibernation. The poor people sleeping in doorways or in condemned housing, sofa-surfing or simply getting by in squalid accommodation. The rest of us getting on with life the best way we can.
As I said at the start, I am glad we are still affected by what we do and what we see. I am by nature a political animal and for the life of me I cannot understand how on Earth we tolerate a society that is inherently so unequal. It’s not as if all the people we see come from the same place in life: if anything it’s the opposite. Many more people are a heartbeat away from having to visit a food bank – a heart attack or a cancer diagnosis away, a sudden redundancy away, a tragic accident away. While it is true that the majority of us are insulated from that grim reality, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
I see the pain etched in the prematurely aged features of some of the people we see. And while I am leaving the food bank to call in Sainsbury’s to buy some healthy food to cook, before returning to a warm home, I know that for many of our callers, our friends for the day, it is a very different world.
Poor people tend to die younger than the better off. That’s what this awful inequality does to our fellow woman and man. Having been brought up in poverty, I feel I have a good perspective of the terrible lives some people have found themselves been forced into. And it incentivises me to help others. With that comes anger, anger at politicians who can change things if they really want to and my fellow human beings who choose to look the other way.
I’m not better than anyone else. In fact, for all manner of reasons, I know I am deeply flawed in many ways, I make terrible decisions, I can be far too judgemental. I probably don’t care more than anyone else, either. But I am driven to make this a better world, in my minuscule way.
For as long as a perfectly decent human being is begging for a sleeping bag because they have nowhere to stay that night, then I’ll carry on with what I am doing. I’ve achieved next to nothing of consequence in my life, outside of helping to raise a family which I concede is an achievement in itself, so perhaps this is me trying to prove, to myself as much as anything else, that there is something I can do that gives meaning to my life and more importantly meaning to the people I am trying to help.
Life isn’t fair, but it should be fairer. And if it was fairer, I could do something else with my Thursdays.
