Day 05/05: The 2,000 Steps of Christmas
This is the last day Digger comes in so I remembered to bring in my blunt useless kitchen knives for him to sharpen, he is such a traditionalist when it comes to sharpening techniques. We give him a station in the kitchen for his steels, blocks and strop and he works through all of the kitchen and volunteer knives.
Naturally I wasn't paying close attention as I used one of his knives later and cut myself when it just skimmed my finger. We use blue bandaids rather than traditional skin colour ones so they can be spotted if they fall off onto food, a latex glove on top to keep it dry.
Our food waste is put into specially marked sacks for recycling, with other separations of plastics and cardboard. Each year we get better at reducing waste as we cook and our chef or kitchen coordinator berate us if we use the wrong bin, easy to do in a rush.
The roast vegetable menu requires we quickly do a lot of parboiling with the range ovens coming quickly into use, I've learnt not to throw away used hot vegetable water and can save a lot of time reusing the large saucepans to work through the backlog of parsnips and potatoes and minimise the number of range burners needed.
Once the spuds are ready they go over to James to prepare for roasting in the ovens, he had the stress of roasting twenty turkeys a few days ago and has been spending a lot of time in front of the ovens. If you can't find a pair of oven gloves whoever is wearing them is asked to move a tray in or out an oven, or relocate hot saucepans. Kitchens force you to work tightly as a team and be ready to help out at a moment's notice as food cooking just can't wait else it's suddenly burnt or soggy.We are getting feedback from the guests and volunteers that they are enjoying the quality and quantity of our food, I must agree it does look good and a huge amount of work and energy goes into its preparation they can only imagine.
Chef Claire is a senior and experienced Crisis chef, her day job is financial marketing but it's down to her strategic planning, preparation and team mgt. skills that we can pull off so many recipes. Chef rarely gets flustered despite being constantly asked for guidance from inexperienced volunteers and I only saw her snap once when four people were talking to her at the same time whilst she was working at a range burner.
A guest couple told us today that this week's Xmas dinner was the first roast they'd had for two years, and their first hot meals in nine months. That we can give such a basic thing to our guests makes us both sad and incredibly proud. I've said it before in my diary and I'll say it again, every action we make can changes lives and may help our guests make that first step back into normality escaping the brutality of the streets.
Their backstory from chef was that one year there were insufficient ovens to roast in so she switched to frying them and found they could still be done just as well, freeing up premium oven space for more food items.
Turns out two burners are enough to produce the quantity needed in time, but you lose a Kitchen Assistant for a shift, that's me, as they have to be all manually fried and watched. I like doing it because people come up to, er, quality check my output and chat with me throughout the afternoon.At the end of dinner I'm outside decanting the spent oil again this time having a chat of sorts with a guest who can't speak English, he figures out a way to tell me he's had a couple of teeth taken out by our visiting dentist so isn't eating as much as he'd like to at the moment!
I fancy a break to eat something after I finish with my hot woks, so it's nice to go round to the front and queue up with guests and other volunteers to be served by one of the kitchen team.By doing this I get to hear the news and see how the food is presented, served and the quantities served out to volunteers. When I look at my plate of hot nutritious food I know the story of every item on the plate, who prepared it, who cooked it and who dished it up into the steel trays.
Oh yes, Stormzy visited The Gate, helped serve our food and met our guests for three hours, giving them his latest clothing range that will cause puzzled looks around London next week.
At noon, 28th Dec, final deliveries by over 180 Luton and fridge vans were filled, sent out to 10 Crisis Day Centres and residential shelters across London in addition, two centres in Coventry and Birmingham before The Hub closes for another year.
Allocating those food donations allowed creative chefs at each centre to continue onto providing a last meal, or stomach filling breakfasts to make sure those remaining of our 4,500 guests are as much recharged and healthy for hopefully new starts into 2019.
Looking at my smartphone I see I averaged 15,000 steps each day at The Gate and 17,000 on Christmas Day. I'm now wondering where those extra 2,000 steps were spent?
I'll be organising new LLCT cycle events in 2019 as fund raisers for December 2019, so I hope you will have time to walk or cycle a river event with me or donate directly to Crisis next year to help end homelessness.
Happy New Year 2019.
Paul
Postscript. Final Word from our chef sent out tonight at 11pm 👩🏼🍳 👨🏽🍳
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The Sunday Times
December 30 2018, 12:01am
Christina Lamb @christinalamb
An army of volunteers, including one who arrived straight from his wedding, has been kept busy at the homeless charity’s centres. Witnessing the vital care they receive from doctors, hairdressers and other support staff has been richly rewarding
Christina Lamb on how your donation could help change lives
Forget finding the perfect present for Great-Aunt Mabel, wrapping gifts while watching Love Actually, juggling Christmas lunch with no family tiffs, or singing your heart out to carols in a lovely old church — this year I discovered the real spirit of Christmas in the unlikeliest place, a six-storey building just off the busy Westway road in west London.
Like many people, I had often thought about volunteering to help the homeless over Christmas but never got round to it. I read about Crisis shelters offering medical care, podiatry, dental treatment, haircutting and even dog grooming and was not sure what I could offer — what use, after all, is a wordsmith?
But this year, every time I went anywhere, from my local supermarket to my office, I passed so many little pavement settlements of cardboard and sleeping bags, and winced at the misery of such lives, that it seemed impossible to ignore. Surely I could at least serve food, play games and chat.
So last week I, my husband and student son picked up our white volunteer badges, scrawled on our names, entered a bustling building where two men were massacring Rihanna songs on a karaoke machine and headed up to the fourth floor for the volunteers’ briefing.
We were surprised to be met by a man in a smart dove-grey suit and blue shirt – we had gone “festive casual” in jeans and colourful knitwear. It turned out that Josh Rogers, 34, who was running the task desk, had come to volunteer straight from his wedding. He had tied the knot at 11am in Camberwell, south London, followed by lunch with family and friends, then jumped on the Tube for his 3pm shift, phoning ahead to warn that he might be a few minutes late.
“I’ve been volunteering here every Christmas for five years,” he said. “I’d signed up for this shift long before we booked the register office and then that was the only date we could get so I didn’t want to let them down.”
11,000 people have helped 4,500 guests and served more than 33,000 meals over the past week
11,000 people have helped 4,500 guests and served more than 33,000 meals over the past weekJez Coulson
What did his wife think? “She also had volunteered with Crisis so she understands,” he said. After his shift finished at 11pm he would head home to pack for their honeymoon the next morning. Not only that but one of his colleagues told me he had come in earlier in the week with a cracked rib.
It was the start of a realisation that something special was going on.
Over the course of my eight-hour shift I met people who returned year after year. I was shown around by Chez, an IT consultant, who told me that after five years she was still a newbie.
She had started volunteering after recovering from a life-threatening illness left her broke and depressed. “Then I started to see all the homeless and realised at least I still had a roof over my head,” she said. “I thought if as a society we’re OK about stepping over people in the street, what does it say about us?”
Manning the desk for people to see the doctors, was James Stanton, 35, also in his fifth year. He was brought along by a friend to try to distract him after his girlfriend had been killed in a plane crash. “It’s like my family now,” he said.
Mike Clarke, 62, who runs the store and cleaning teams with military discipline, is in his 30th year. “I’m ex-army and when I came out I was homeless for 12 months and was helped by Crisis and never looked back.” He is now second-in-command at the Royal British Legion poppy factory in Richmond.
Then there is Anton, a taxi driver, who along with fellow cabbies delivers backpacks to the homeless all year.
There were many newbies like us including students volunteering for their first year. We were all a bit uncertain to start with as Josh sent us off on tasks such as manning the luggage check-in for people who arrive with their lives in a few supermarket bags; organising bingo games; serving tea and coffee in the free cafe; or overseeing the computer area where people watch football or Bollywood films or work on CVs.
The college had been transformed for eight days into three floors of activities and sleeping places. From 6pm on December 22 to 10am today it has been open to anyone who is a rough sleeper, ferried in by outreach teams and referred to not as homeless but “guests”.
There, instead of a park bench, a doorway or an underpass, where they are regularly abused or urinated on, they have a safe place to sleep and a hot shower. There are three hot meals a day, cooked by Steve and his team, and all provided by waiter service, and in between they can get legal advice and support with housing, benefits and employment.
There are doctors, dentists and podiatrists, as well as representatives of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Samaritans, Gamblers Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.
“The idea is in one week they can access everything that would normally take someone on the street months,” said David Wright, 51, who runs the west London centre. “Most of the year they go up against services where the answer is no. We’re the one week of the year where we try and say yes.”
It is not just services. The centre has yoga classes and musical instruments and offers football training, along with trips to a Queens Park Rangers match and visits to Arsenal’s Emirates stadium and to the British Museum.
The college library had been transformed into a sewing centre where Susan, a kitchen fitter, and her team sitting at machines will have repaired 600 zips and trouser hems by the end of the week. The college’s mock airline cabin had become a clothing store where people could pick up a warm coat or a suit to go to job interviews.
My first stint was on arts and crafts — not exactly my forte but I was soon chatting to Lubyor from Bulgaria, a former chef at Nando’s who has a gambling addiction and a talent for painting.
At the next table was Chris “Tarzan” from Poland, who was happily colouring, and Olamiah, a Jamaican who did endless pen drawings of cars — 6,000, he told me, since September. “Anyone can draw,” he reassured me, “though it would be easier if you had an ‘L’ in your name.”
Soon I was joined by Jamal from Sudan in a dapper coat, who wanted to practise writing in English, and Therasa, 26, from Eritrea, who told me how she had been held by smugglers in a Libyan detention centre while they called her parents and threatened to kill her unless they transferred $2,000. She had to work for six months to earn enough to pay the smuggler to put her on an overloaded boat of 150 people that somehow made it to Sicily. I introduced them to bingo, and Therasa was devastated to be just one number off a full house and a mystery prize.
Later, manning a table in reception, I met Raf from California who told me how hard it was every day to beg for £10 or £11 to pay for a hostel or face another night on the streets.
“It’s getting harder and harder to get money — people pay for things with phones so don’t have cash or they are fed up with so many people on the streets so they just don’t look at us. Sometimes they buy me Five Guys [burgers] because they think we spend money on drugs — it’s nice they buy food but what I most want is a warm, dry place to sleep.”
Patrick from Ireland told me he was enjoying getting up, having two hot breakfasts then going back to sleep. “On the streets, normally I only get an hour,” he said.
On the ground floor I met Pammi the barber, who has been averaging 30 cuts or shaves a day. Formerly homeless, he taught himself to cut by staring through the window of Vidal Sassoon.
Nearby two English students were showing people into the cinema for a screening of the action thriller Entebbe.
Of course it is not all sweetness and light. Many here are suffering mental illness and some form of addiction. No alcohol is allowed but organisers usually find a “vodka bush” in the green outside.
The saddest thing for regular volunteers is seeing the same guests back each year, which means they have not managed to get them off the streets.
“We’re seeing more and more each year,” said David. “If we can get them in the first three months, it’s much easier to get them off the street.”
The west London building was at capacity with 284 guests — one of 15 Crisis centres across the UK, which is three more than usual because of rising demand. There is even a specialist centre with kennels where homeless people with dogs can have them seen to by vets while getting shelter and food.
It is a massive volunteer operation: 11,000 people have helped 4,500 guests and served more than 33,000 meals over the past week. It all relies on donations — just £28.18 from you enables one person to enjoy this facility. Thanks to the generosity of Sunday Times readers, more can.
Apart from money they also need bedding, toiletries, backpack and clothes, particularly new underwear and socks. Everyone who leaves when it closes today is given a goody bag.
In a year of division over Brexit, nothing has more restored my faith in humanity than my shift at Crisis. I cannot believe I referred to it as giving up a day — it was us who gained something amazing.
@christinalamb
Don’t just walk on by — stop and chat
Volunteering at a homeless shelter for the first time I had no idea what to expect. The number of helpers, old and young — including many millennials such as myself, who had given up chunks of their Christmas — astonished me. But the most valuable experience came from the fleeting moments spent chatting to the guests. It put a smile on my face to see people who had lost everything make jokes and laugh.
“We cannot just curl up and die,” one man told me, before offering a fellow guest his Hugo Boss jeans because they were nicer than the ones he had. Everyone had a story to tell and really put a human face on a dire situation. With the new year knocking on our door, I urge everyone to talk to that bearded man with a Labrador outside your local supermarket so we are not the kind of country where people walk on by.
Lourenco Anunciacao, 19, is a student (and Christina Lamb’s son)
How you can give
Thanks to the generosity of readers, our appeal has raised £335,718 for Crisis so far. This includes £42,000 from the players of People’s Postcode Lottery.
Call 0800 999 8020 or go to crisis.org.uk/sundaytimes
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