I was already tired when I arrived at the food bank today. Real life problems, especially when there are lots of them, some admittedly more serious than others, can wear you down. At the moment, I’m worn down, mentally anyway, and now I’m physically knackered, too.
We had a lot of people in today. We don’t know their stories – the referrers deal with all that stuff – but sometimes they tell us anyway. And you’d need a heart of stone not to be moved, upset and angry about the state of our country that means we need food banks like ours.
Many of the referrals were directed to me, which I don’t mind at all. I’d like to think that’s because they value what I do and maybe who I am. Throughout my working life, I have worked with drug addicts and they’re not hard to spot. They’re often painfully thin, with deep lined etched into their faces, and they often have bad teeth, assuming they have any teeth at all. Because we were so busy, and our store cupboard can only house three people at any one time, waiting times were long. One person kept asking me when their bag of items were going to be ready. They needed to collect their ‘script’ at 3.00pm, which is to say their methadone. I’m not putting numbers or percentages, but there were more than one or two people who clearly had drug problems. But seeing drug addicts in a food bank should not be considered unusual. The country is full of them, too. And many addicts are at the bottom of the pile in our society.
I rarely find that two people have the same story to tell. The only thing that ties them together is that they have no food to eat.
Many of our callers bump into their friends at food banks. What does that tell you other than food poverty often comes from a particular demographic, people who see each other day in day out in the struggle to exist? I use the word exist advisedly: this is not life as we know it.
I’ve said this before but we all try to make people’s visits as pain free as possible. I wouldn’t want to use the word enjoyable because how could it be? But where there are tears – and there were many today – we try to bring smiles. Just little things like giving people tea or coffee. We put out confectionary on the tables people sit at and most weeks the community café that uses the hall in the morning leaves the unused cakes and soft drinks. Today, we even had a selection of headwear and gloves to give away, as well as some bottled water and tins of fizzy lemonade. Doubtless some kind soul dropped them off. I know I keep saying it but there are some incredibly kind people around.
The hall was still very busy when I left some 20 minutes after we were closed. I have stuff to do tonight and I apologised to my fellow volunteers for leaving them to deal with the final food bags and the tidying up. I usually stay right to the end, so hopefully next week I’ll make up for it.
I end where I started. If I’m worn down, both mentally and physically, how about our friends who today came to us as a last resort? Christ, I’ve got it easy compared to them. I could drive back to a nice warm home with plenty of food in the cupboard and fridge. I met a guy today whose oven was broken and just one of the rings was working on the hob. He didn’t have a can opener either, but fortunately we had a couple and we let him have one. My kingdom for a can opener. That’s what it’s come to.
But don’t think that food banks are the exclusive preserve of the working class and the underclass below it. That just isn’t true, judging from I am seeing every single week. Poverty is beginning to reach out. And I worry where this ends.
