Team Arden Foodbank Out and About … Far and Wide

Meet Neil, one of our volunteers at the Alcester Foodbank. As well as helping people in Alcester, Neil and his wife also volunteer at a soup kitchen organised by an English speaking church in Belgrade, Serbia. They run 3 sessions a week, one for ladies only, and two for anyone.  Between 30 and 50 people attend each session. People can have  a shower and use the washing machine/dryer. Volunteers also have a limited number of clothes and shoes that they can hand out on an “as-need” basis. Neil tells us that life is really tough for those that have very little in Serbia, as there is no support structure or agencies to help. Neil, his wife and volunteers from different nationalities come together, to try and give the homeless some hope, with the limited resources available to them.

The Belgrade soup kitchen.

For each session when people arrive, they are offered tea or coffee and a sweet snack depending upon what the local bakeries had left over from the day before.

Ground walnut roll – like an English jam roll cut up. Clients can choose coffee or two jugs of tea. The local coffee is always served black with spoonfuls of sugar! Clients help themselves to that. There is a choice of rosehip or mint tea  but clients have no preference. In Serbia tea is just tea!

This is the area where people sit and chat with their drinks. The washing machine/dryer is busy in the foreground.

Neil prepares take away savoury snack bags from the bakeries’ left over food. This can be anything from a sandwich, pizza, cheese pie, meat pie, stuffed olive roll, cheese roll, sausage roll, pork scratching, pretzel, sesame finger etc.  He has no idea what he will find in the black bin liner that the leftovers arrive in.

People tucking into their main meal. Everyone receives a salad and bread roll to start and a hot bowl of stew to follow.

The cooking facilities are minimal for preparing up to 50 meals three times a week.

There is always extra bread, and fruit and vegetables are available too, for people to help themselves to, and also take away for later.

The team of volunteers working with Neil the day he took the photo, made up of Serbians, an Austrian and, of course, an Englishman! The various teams of volunteers are made up of many different nationalities from the Balkans and a number of Russians who have had to leave their home country.

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