A Mother and Her Son
Speaking to a local Rotary Group one day, a member of the audience and long time friend of mine asked me if Life’s Kitchen would be interested in making soup for the residents of the Interfaith Sanctuary once a week as the shelter didn’t have a feeding program for residents. I said we would be happy to do so as the training opportunity for our students would be truly outstanding.
I come to work early, and during the winter mornings it is still dark outside when I drive by the Interfaith Sanctuary. I saw something on one of those dark rides in that really disturbed me: the silhouetted images of a homeless single mother holding the hand of her little boy walking across the street. Presumably he was going to school but school didn’t start for a few hours. It was a sad portrait and commentary of the times we live in. That hit me in a very deep place that I hadn’t been to for a long time. Something needed to happen for mother and son and Life’s Kitchen was in a position to help. We hadn’t budgeted for a project like this and the Interfaith Sanctuary didn’t have the funding either. We would have to look for help from our community: a community that believes in helping those in need.
Approaching several groups, we pitched the idea and were able to find the funding to support the project. The good people of the Wal-Mart Foundation, Consumer Financial Solutions, the Ada County Association of Realtors, US Bank, the Idaho Foodbank and Albertsons all pitched in to help fund a project that had gone unanswered for far too long.
Thanks to their help, the students at Life’s Kitchen now prepare 12 gallons of soup to feed 135 residents at the Interfaith Sanctuary each day. We are able to bring in chefs from local restaurants to showcase their soups and teach our students how to make them so they can make that recipe on behalf of the restaurants.
I’m so pleased that we are able to help the people at the Interfaith Sanctuary. It is my hope that things have gotten better for that mother and son. Who knows, if we can make things better for those two, perhaps we can all work together to make things better for everyone.
