Feb 14 2009
I left my husband on Valentines’ Day!
I left my husband on Valentines’ Day!
Image source by Łukasz Dunikowski
No panic, only for a few hours. Do you remember my post about my new years resolutions? Point four was: “… I am looking for a charity that needs a volunteer that is willing to gets her hands dirty and allows me to help despite the fact that my Czech is very basic.”
Found one! I did a lot of asking around and searching the internet and finally found out that the parish of St.Thomas at Josefská 8 (Prague 1) web site runs a soup kitchen and clothes distribution every Saturday from 09:00-10:00. So I left hubby alone on Valentines’ Day morning and took the tram into town. As I arrived at the monastery there were already two groups of people waiting. One orderly queue of hungry people and a small group of volunteers. I must say due to the language issue I didn’t talk much with anybody and just observed whilst waiting for the door to open. I will fight the urge to jump to conclusions so I leave that for a later post. Just a short report how the morning went:
First I was assigned to distribute, with another woman, soup and bread and then, after we finished, I went over to the clothes room. The whole event was very well organized and run smoothly, words, greetings?, jokes? were exchanged and it seemed to me that people knew each other since time. The whole set-up was very barrier free, the soup and the bread were on a table beside us what I found from a psychological point of view very good. I felt the whole time that there was an effort to maintain an atmosphere of “us” rather then “me” and “them” if you know what I mean. I couldn’t help much in the clothes distribution apart of passing things on, the room was a bit tiny, but I got some more information about what was needed and how things were done. In case some of my readers that live in Prague have an over-flowing wardrobe. Things that are needed would be: First of all more warm mens jackets, it is cold here, below 0 Celsius, and warm mens clothes are needed. Mens because there are far more men coming then women. Warm winter jackets, sweaters, jumpers, gloves, trousers, woolly hats etc. If you have something like this available for donation please bring it on a Saturday morning from 09:00-10:00 to St. Thomas or contact me by leaving a comment here.
After the clothes distribution there was very little else to do, a bit of tidying up and chatting amongst the volunteers and off we went. I myself went home feeling guilty of living in a heated flat and enough food in the fridge and clothes in the wardrobe. But despite the guilt I will be back next Saturday.
Because it was not the guilt that motivated me in the first place to come. Now I only have to find a source of cheap warm mens winter jackets!
