04 Jan The Hippie Kitchen

Ever wanted to help out at a soup kitchen? This is the place to go! We arrived at 7:45am and started to help prepare the food, chopping vegetables, bagging bread and cutting onions to prepare the meal to feed the homeless. The kitchen opened at 10:30am to the homeless people and closed at 12:00 then we had to help clean up. It was very humbling to see the types of homeless people coming in to get food and sad to see little girls younger than me in the queue too. We served about 800 of the 26,000 homeless people in L.A. Some of the people were friendly but others weren’t, I made it a challenge to try and get as many of them to smile as I could. One of the women in charge said not to say ‘Have a nice day’ because it might hurt their feelings. I had to chop the celery for the soup, bag the bread and then at the end, re-fill the salt and pepper shakers. To make the shakers they took Starbucks frappucino bottles, cleaned them out, cut little holes in the lids and filled the bottles with salt or pepper. The perfectly good food they were using would have been thrown out from grocery stores like, Vons, Ralphs and Albertsons, if it wasn’t for soup kitchens like the St Francis Center or the Hippie kitchen. To find out how you can help go to:
www.lacatholicworker.org