One Hundred Litres

For some time now it has been a dream of mine to increase The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen to 100 litres so that we can be even more generous with our soup than we currently are. Most weeks we have been serving 70lts and sometimes just 50lts depending on how close we are to the social grants having been paid.

Over the last few weeks we've just been using our 70lt pot and a couple of times we've had to turn folk away because we had run out, and that never feels good.

So it was great to be able to be our usual generous selves and then some, as we had plenty to go around tonight and by the time the queue had fizzled out we had just a single one litre pot and a cup left.

As well as the soup and packets of peanut pastes, we were also able to give each of the adults a packet of lentil mix and a packet of instant noodles so we know that our regulars have some food to tide them over for day or two which is a tremendous blessing.

It does feel like we may be serving 100 litres of soup for the next few weeks, especially as winter continues to bite so savagely. This is certainly the coldest winter we remember in our years out here.

Once again the vibe was very chilled (especially now that the kids from Macassar understand why we're asking them to move away from the door), and it was a joy to be able to chat with some of our regulars and hear about how they're doing, even though for most of them things aren't great.

We're also a little frustrated at present because we're being asked for blankets by our regular homeless guys and we keep having to disappoint them because we can't find any reasonably priced ones. Apparently blankets are one of many items that have been caught up in the backlog at the docks thanks to Covid! Hopefully before long we'll manage to acquire some for the guys because they really need them with the cold fronts that keep hitting the Cape.

Please join us in praying for blankets for our homeless Soup Kitchen regulars.