A Community Kitchen in Gorakhpur Completes 50 Days
THE Gorakhpur community kitchen run by young people with help and contributions from the masses has completed 50 days of cooking meals and feeding the poor.
The community kitchen being run in the Ambedkar Hostel at Golghar in Gorakhpur had completed 50 days. From the next day we were to close our kitchen. Two of our friends active in the kitchen, Ravindra and Satendra had gone back home in the morning. Our other friends also arrived late at the kitchen, since we no longer had to prepare food for the people. Then we got a phone call, “Bhaiyya, aren’t you bringing some food today? I haven’t been able to arrange any food for the children the whole day”.
All of us were reminiscing about the beautiful experiences of the past 50 days while we cleaned up the hostel. After a while I got a phone call from Satendra who had gone home earlier in the morning. He said that he was not feeling at all good to be just staying home and wished he could come back to the kitchen. I told him to come if he liked, as there was some flour remaining which we were going to distribute among the needy, and he could help with that.
After some time I got another phone call. This call was from the area where our kitchen had been feeding people for the past 50 days. The caller was a woman who asked if it was really true that we would not be bringing food today. I told her it was true; we had informed everyone yesterday that we would not be bringing food from the next day. The woman said, “Please bring food just for today. We will make some arrangements from tomorrow; but today we could not make any arrangements and our children are hungry”.
It was 5 PM. I told our friends what the woman had said and we discussed what was to be done. We decided to phone the people of that area and tell them we would be a little late, but would come with food for 100 people.
We wondered what food could be prepared in such a short time. A few friends suggested that we could easily prepare ‘tahri’, as we had rice, vegetables and a stove and ‘tahri’ could be prepared quickly.
We started preparations with cutting onions and unpeeled potatoes. When we went into the store room, we discovered that we had no rice left! How could we make the ‘tahri’? We phoned our friend Shailendra and told him the problem. Shailendra, with the help of two of his friends, came without delay to us bringing 50 kg rice, potatoes and a sack of soya beans. All of us then pitched in, preparing the food on a war footing. By 8 PM we had prepared rice mixed with vegetables (‘tahri’) for about 70-80 people. The vehicle which was used for loading and distributing the food belonged to Satendra, and he had already taken it back. His elder brother Dhirendra immediately arranged another vehicle into which the food was loaded and transported to the waiting people.
After the food was distributed all of us discussed and decided that we would run our kitchen for some more days. Meanwhile, we would also take help from friends to arrange rations for distribution among very needy families so that they could prepare food for at least 15 days. We decided that we would finally close our kitchen only after these arrangements were made.
- Sujit Sonu, RYA, Gorakhpur
