On Monday, January 11th, 2016, our group volunteered with Saint John’s Bread and Life Soup Kitchen in Brooklyn for the second time. Saint John’s Bread and Life Soup Kitchen serves over 1,000 hot meals to hungry New Yorkers each day. They also have a food pantry where people can order select goods from the pantry and receive them all bagged and ready to go. This time, instead of taking a tour of the soup kitchen’s facility, we actually were able to work in the kitchen and help prepare and serve lunch for the guests. After putting on hair nets, aprons and gloves, we scrubbed cabinets and helped clear tables. We then entered the kitchen and started to help other volunteers break spaghetti up so that it could be cooked. I was fascinated by the extremely large pot of water that the cooks were using to cook the spaghetti. It was almost as large as a bathtub! After the pasta, broccoli and meatballs were cooked, we started to serve the guests their food in a “cafeteria-like” fashion. We served food for around 2 hours. Layne and I took turns serving the spaghetti and passing plates down and Tibeau sprinkled parmesan cheese. I was surprised by how many people came to their soup kitchen just during the lunch service. I learned that many of the people who come to Saint John’s Bread and Life Soup Kitchen are regulars, meaning that they come everyday/quite often. I especially enjoyed chatting with some of the guests while they were waiting for their food because it gave me a chance to actually interact with them. Overall, I found this fieldwork pretty successful and I’m glad that we finally were able to do some “hands-on” volunteer work with Saint John’s.
