from amma.org

[Guest guest]

Home Cooking from a Mother's Kitchen

April 16, 2005

 

After the tsunami, the whole world was worried about how thousands of people

suddenly homeless would manage until they could get back on their own feet. How

would they be sheltered? How could they eat, with neither cooking facilities nor

the money to buy food?

 

Immediately after the tsunami, hundreds of government agencies, ngos, relief

organizations, religious groups, and even individuals stepped forward to help.

The tsunami of the 26th of December 2004, it has been said, drew unprecedented

compassionate action from all over the world.

 

Now it is more than three months later, and many who first came forward have

exhausted their funds or time or volunteers, or have moved on to help in some

other worthy cause. Only a few are still serving the tsunami affected.

 

The M. A. Math in Kerala, India, is among those few. A villager who has lost

everything put it this way: “If Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi, founder of the Math)

hadn’t been there, we’d be dead now. We’d have starved, or rioted. She took care

of us the first day and she’s still taking care of us.”

 

Indeed Amma’s organization is still taking care of people in Tamil Nadu, Sri

Lanka, and other tsunami-affected parts of India. On a long island just off the

west coast of Kerala, you find the Math, headquarters of Amma’s various

educational and charitable institutions. The Math grounds were inundated during

the tsunami, but from the first wave onwards, residents and visitors were

involved in rescue and relief work: they pulled drowning people out of the

water, ferried crowds across the backwaters to the mainland, allocated three

institutions of higher education for immediate shelters, and by dinnertime that

first night were feeding the refugees.

 

The feeding continues to this day. It has to. The people still can’t manage on

their own.

 

So every day, three times a day, the Math sends out eight trucks and vans to

deliver cooked meals to ten thousand people. That’s 30,000 meals a day. For 112

days now, and still continuing.

 

When we say “the Math sends”, we can lose sight of what goes into this

incredible and sustained feeding venture. We should say, “the people send.”

Let’s see the people:

 

Starting at about 3:30 in the morning (not many hours after the last pots from

the night before have been cleaned), people gather to prepare ten thousand

breakfasts. Brahmacharinis (women renunciates) and village women volunteers (and

sometimes their children) sit on the floor or at tables in a big hall and chop

mountains of vegetables.

 

 

 

In March and April, here, it is hot and humid; people who have fans run them all

night long and still perspire. If the kitchen has cooled down at all in the

night, it will now grow almost unbearably hot when the cooks light gas burners

and begin cooking the farina-like mixture that goes into a traditional Kerala

breakfast of upama.

 

Once breakfast is ready, men (volunteers from the island villages as well as

brahmacharis) load the huge serving vessels full of upama (along with morning

chai, or sweet tea) into the trucks and vans, and soon these vehicles head out

to the eighteen food counters all up and down the island—and one school, where

48 children get breakfast before their classes start. The people in their

temporary shelters, broken houses, thatch huts, hear breakfast coming—it sounds

just like lunch and dinner: men’s strong voices are singing loud enough to

almost drown out the truck engines!

 

The enthusiasm the food delivery people seem to feel makes a positive start to

the morning. As they unload big serving vessels at each food counter, hungry

people open their tiffins and begin to move close to the counter. There, local

volunteers, both men and women, and householder women residents from the ashram

are ready, spoons and ladles in hand, to serve the food, to pour the tea.

 

“Do you like this work?” we asked one of the women.

 

“Yes. It always feels good to serve people food.”

 

She was one of the ashram ammumars, or grandmothers. How much of her life had

she spent preparing and serving food for her husband and children, and then no

doubt the grandchildren? Now she serves a bigger family, and feels good about

it.

 

Children do what children see: in the Alappad Panchayat, they see people joining

together to help each other, and they want to get involved, too:

 

Back at the ashram, cooking pots have been washed, more vegetables have been

chopped, rice has been steaming, and lunch is nearly ready. Good thing, too,

since by the time the trucks return, having collected the empty serving vessels,

it is time to wash the vessels and refill them. This time it will be rice,

vegetable curry, and sambar (a traditional spicy “soup” that is spooned over the

rice and curry).

 

Again the food trucks will go out, the men in the back will sing, the people

will gather, the ashramites and villagers will work together to will serve, and

the empty vessels will be taken home. The villagers might take rest after the

nourishing main meal. But back at the kitchen, there is no time for rest: more

vegetables have been chopped, rice has been boiled in lots of water to make

kanji, a rice gruel, a spicy vegetable sauce has been prepared, and it’s time to

wash the serving vessels and refill them and send them out again. This time, the

meal is very simple: kanji with a scoop of curry. People crowd near the truck,

and the men who loaded the vessels become the servers, spooning the gruel into

the plates and tiffins the people raise high:

 

Taking care of the food needs of the ashram has always been a full-time

commitment of time, preparation space, and personnel in the kitchen. Now, with

the 30,000 extra meals a day, full-time has moved into over-time.

 

Over-time pay is rendered in how people feel when they take care of each other.

 

Read more about the food support statistics.

 

By Janani

Correspondent, Amritapuri

16 April 2005