The Soup Kitchen Experience by Stephanie Gil
What is the Interact Club? What exactly do they do? What does it mean to participate at a soup kitchen? As a member of the club for three years, I can say with certainty that we are a fun community service club that assists in various community areas/ events. We visit the lovely people at Drum Hill monthly, do Blue Mountain Park clean-ups, and make monthly visits to the soup kitchen in town on the first Saturday of every month.
Helping at the soup kitchen is one of our most rewarding and fun activities. The fun begins the Friday before when we congregate in Ms. Risoli’s room to chop up carrots, break apart lettuce, and mix it all together to make a large, colorful salad. We also mix pasta sauce in with some pasta that our lovely teacher- advisor, Ms. Risoli, prepares for us the day before. It’s messy and someone, or almost everyone, always seems to get a little splattered with sauce, but that’s what makes it entertaining.
The next morning we meet at 11:30 to serve the food. We prepare to serve by wrapping forks in napkins. As we assemble a large enough pile, someone else will pour cups of juice. Then a couple other members will cut bread and cover it with a butter/ garlic mixture. Followed by a bake in the oven for fresh garlic bread. We serve our pasta, salad, meatballs and sausage, garlic bread, juice, and Ms. Risoli’s DE- LICIOUS homemade brownies, the best, as folks begin to arrive. Each of us commands a position. Either serving one of the items, or running the food to anyone who wants it.
As we designate who will do what jobs, we begin to develop a system that just flows. Running a soup kitchen takes teamwork; something our club definitely has amongst its friendly, cooperative, and genuinely good-hearted members. Because one person is doing one simple task, either put a fork on the tray or putting a bowl of salad on a tray, it really does become an assembly line. We may have the occasional slip up of a meatball on the floor, but are pretty good at keeping the food on people’s trays rather than the floor. Thanks to the helpful staff at the soup kitchen, the help of our senior members, and the help of Ms. Risoli, who is the guiding light of all of us, we are able to feed around fifty people per soup kitchen. It is fun to be with friends, and you go home feeling great because you filled someone’s stomach; and if we’re lucky we’ll make enough food that we get to fill our own.