When The Evening Sun staff agreed to give up a Saturday morning to work at the Taste ‘N’ See Soup Kitchen, I imagined dishing out bowls of Campbell’s, and going on my way. As I found out during the Chenango United Way’s Day of Caring, working at the Oxford soup kitchen, involved a lot more than soup.

Despite the name, soup was not the meal we were dishing out for the rare Saturday afternoon meal. (The soup kitchen generally serves on Monday nights.) For the special event, we made salad, ziti with a turkey bolognese sauce and garlic bread, with vanilla pudding for desert.

At 9:30 a.m. Evening Sun staffers Melissa Stagnaro, Melissa deCordova and her daughter Lane, Jeff Genung, and I, accompanied by my cousin Katelynn Mesko, arrived at Saint Paul’s Church and prepared for the noon meal. The first chore was washing, arranging and setting the tables and chairs for the crowd that would be arriving only a few hours later.

With guidance from some of the soup kitchen’s regular volunteers – including Evening Sun Sports Editor Patrick Newell and his parents Margaret and Richard – the tables were set and we began chopping vegetables for the salad and preparing the garlic bread. Margaret prepared us for the day ahead. “We generally serve about 150 meals,” she said. Since a Saturday meal is not a common occurrence, the soup kitchen volunteers weren’t sure how many people to expect for the noon meal.