The food bank continued

We had a quiet day at the food bank a couple of weeks back. It was the Easter weekend and the Pearce Institute, the CAS office and Money Matters were all closed. Our only clients seemed to be people who couldn't get in to these local agencies for red slips to get them 3 days supply of food so had to come to us for a 1 day emergency supply. We used the session to reload the shelves and fill the boxes but also for some team bonding with lots of good craic, some mickey-taking and great stories that allowed us all to get to know each other better.

That stood us in good stead today because everything seemed to happen at once. The kids went back to school today, having eaten their parents out of house and home, and we had people arriving well before the doors opened.

In addition, the local supermarkets had a big stock-take and needed to offload stuff that was close to its sell-by date. Celtic Park had filled its car park with food donations in memory of Brother Walfrid - bless you all, Celtic fans - and we got our share delivered, boxes and boxes of stuff. An Asian supermarket decided to donate rice - two hundred 25lb bags - plus many packets and jars of sauces. A friend of the food bank sent in two trays of biscuits and two of crisps, luxuries the food bank can't often afford. The food bank staff had also been to the supermarket and we had trays of sugar and tins of meat and veg to put away.

It was pretty hectic for a while. We had families of five, couples, singles and a lot of emergency applicants. No sooner had we served one client than the people upstairs were calling down another order. At one point, we had to tell them the boxes were empty (we keep 11 boxes filled and ready to hand out, 6 for singles and the others for families) and they would need to get clients to have a seat and a cuppa tea till we were ready. The advantage of that is that the upstairs people get a chance to talk to the clients and gauge how they are doing.

We're a good team the six of us. We sometimes argue: 'We are NOT putting tins of condensed milk in instead of UHT. Have you tasted condensed milk? Imagine that on your cornflakes! Go to the shop and get milk!' We sometimes forget each other's names in the heat of the moment: Henry got two apologies today for that. But by and large, we get the orders done and delivered to the right people, partly because Lorna acts as our gatekeeper: 'You'll have to wait' is her war cry. When it was all over, I found one bag of food that we had forgotten to pass on. It was part of an emergency order. We felt bad about that but emergency cases get two other bags of food to tide them over so, all being well, they should manage till they can get a red slip. That, we think, was the only problem.

Now we've run out of toilet paper. Where does the best deal on cheap toilet paper, folks?