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.
With the sauce bubbling away in a crock pot, we washed and dried the dishes used to cook the meal and waited for the hungry customers to arrive. At 11:30 crowds began filing through the doors and making their way to the tables.
Soup kitchen organizer Charlie McMullen explained that the crowd is diverse. Some need the food. Some are elderly and come from the socialization as much as for the food, and some are members of the community who come to support a good cause and drop a donation into the donation box.
As noon approached, we went around the tables serving drinks and watching people settle into seats before we started bringing out the plates. An assembly line formed in the kitchen and the servers made their way through the line as the kitchen volunteers placed items on the plates. Going counter clockwise around the room, the plates were delivered to the hungry customers in no time and we were able to start delivering seconds and thirds. Some people asked to take extra plates of food home, and the volunteers gladly complied.
Within a half hour, the food was gone, the tables were cleaned and the volunteers began the task of cleaning up the kitchen and making their way home. By the end of the day, 68 people had entered the parish hall for something to eat, and a total of 100 meals were served.
I never expected such a big turnout at the Oxford soup kitchen, and I guess I never knew what a big roll these organizations play in our county; not just to the needy, but to everyone in the community who takes part.