| Aug 10 2009 |
“Soup kitchen” work from the ground up in the Okanagan Valley |
Article taken with permission from the October 8, 2008 edition of the "Christian Renewal"
HEADLINES
“Soup kitchen” work from the ground up in the Okanagan Valley
Hermina Dykxhoorn
“Water! Does anyone need water? I’ve got clean water,” cried Stephen Pasveer, who, at five years old, was the youngest of the 38 members of Calgary’s Bethel United Reformed Church who spent a week of their vacations at the Okanagan Gleaners in mid-August. Stephen had found a little niche for himself and spent five days, four hours each day, without complaint, trundling around the approximately 20 work stations, pulling a wagon with four pails of clean, warm water to replace the dirty water in which the prepared vegetables were washed before processing.
And the vegetable of the day, every day we were there, was onions; hundreds of thousands of bruised,beaten and abused onions. They had been rejected as unfit for human consumption, but hungry people aren’t as picky as sophisticated North American consumers. We go to the grocery store, handle each item of produce individually; we tap, we prod, we smell, we pinch and finally we choose only those without blemish or spot. The recipients of the Gleaners’ work know nothing of grocery stores filled with food. Many scrounge and fight for whatever they can get and not a few live with malnutrition and often real hunger.
Gleaning is an ancient activity that was already codified in the Levitical laws as a practice that would gain the favour and blessing of God for its practitioner. Deuteronomy 24: 19 says, “When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the migrant, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord God may bless you in all your undertakings.” Other scriptural references allude to the fatherless, the poor and the alien. The Biblical account of Ruth the Gleaner describes the complicated and intriguing rules surrounding family and provision by which the early Israelites arranged their lives. Gleaning was an integral part of that culture.
In all likelihood, because of this Biblical basis, gleaning and the leaving of materials and goods for gleaning, was still a standard part of rural European life in the Middle Ages. By the 19th century there were even specific legal rights called “usufruct rights”, established so that the poor had the right to use and enjoy another’s property on the understanding that this use would occur without destroying, damaging or diminishing that property. Balzac’s 1845 novel Les Paysans or The Peasants describes the resistance of French peasants to the movement to reduce or completely withdraw their usufruct rights. Jean Francois Millet’s 1867 painting, The Gleaners, depicts three women collecting some remaining wheat, barley or other grain that had been left behind after harvest. This era seems to have marked the beginning of the end of widespread gleaning as a way of caring for the poor. I suspect the modern welfare state has taken over this function with enforced charity through taxation precluding this personal sysem of giving, at least in western societies.
The Bethel group arrived at the work site on Saturday. Sunday we attended the local Alliance Church in the morning, there being no Reformed church in the area. We held our own joyful evening worship in the open air until it was too dark to see our hymn books.
On Monday morning, for two of our group, the work started early, just after 6:00 AM. Brenda Yskes and Janet VanderKooi, Pastor Joel VanderKooi’s wife, made all our meals and by 7:15 AM a hot breakfast was waiting for the rest of us. The Okanagan Gleaners provide a kitchen, laundry facilities and a dining room for the use of its volunteers. They also have serviced camping spots for trailers as well as providing a few trailers and a cottage for accommodations. Most of our group tented in the orchard under the low hanging plum trees.
Just after an 8:30 AM. start, Bob Ellis, the Plant Manager opened our workday with instructions and a word of prayer. The Okanagan Gleaners was founded in 1994 by a group of local Christian believers who deplored the amount of waste they noticed in the vegetable fields and the fruit orchards in the area. These dedicated locals still oversee its operation.
Two people manned each station and, apart from a 15 minute break, we worked hard for four hours cleaning onions. All rot is removed from each onion and it’s washed leaving a beautiful, clean and nourishing onion to be processed through the dicing machine, spread on large trays and then dried for eight hours in a huge drier. In the evening we’d spend another half hour scraping the dried vegetable off the trays and placing them in one of hundreds of storage barrels. Every day about a dozen, mostly retired, townsfolk come and help out. Some families come to the Gleaners every year with their children for one week of a three week vacation. Winter volunteers from the surrounding communities make up vacuum bags of dried soup mix from the mixture of the barrels of vegetables processed in the summer. Along with dried onions, the gleaners produce brussels sprouts, tomatoes, carrots, peppers, beans, peas, broccoli, cauliflower, beets, turnips, potatoes, lentils and pot barley. One vacuum pack from the Okanagan Gleaners provides the needy with 100 nutritious bowls of soup. They also produce dried apples and pears. It’s quick, light and easy and never spoils. And it’s all from produce that would otherwise have been plowed under or taken to a landfill and discarded.
The Gleaners work through aid agencies to distribute the product where it is most needed. Hungry families around the globe have benefitted from almost 50 million servings of soup and dried fruit processed by volunteers at the Okanagan Gleaners.
At 12:30 PM our hot meal was waiting for us and the evening meal was also packed and ready for those families who wanted to take their kids to the beach for swimming or for joy rides and water skiing in our pastor’s boat. The day was topped off with a delicious picnic supper. Those without children spent the afternoon touring the scores of wineries in the area or fellowshipping at the campsite. The Gleaners is located in Oliver, BC which is just a stone’s throw from Osoyoos, the warmest spot in Canada and also one of our premier wine producing areas. It’s actually very much like the Tuscany wine region in Italy.
Once we filled the barrels with the dried onions at about 8:30 PM we spent our evenings in fellowship and song.
The Gleaner movement is growing. BC’s Fraser Valley Gleaners was established in 1998 and another is being contemplated for Medicine Hat, Alberta. Shelly Stone, the new manager of the Cambridge, Ontario Gleaners was at the Okanagan facility to learn the ropes while we were there. Planning for the Cambridge site started in 2004 and the operation will begin production in their new 7000 sq. ft. building this month. The Cambridge site does not have camping facilities, although there is a campground just 10 minutes away. After experiencing the camaraderie of the camping experience Shelley speculated they might have to consider incorporating some accommodation onsite.
In addition to the benefit of volunteering and the satisfaction of knowing that for every hour you work you are generating the equivalent of 140 food servings for the needy, church members, who would not normally interact, also have an opportunity to share in a bond of fellowship and get to know one another.
Posted so you can’t miss it, in many places at the site, the Okanagan Gleaner motto expresses well the sole motivation of the operation. “Not to us, O Lord, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.”
Return
