I arrived on O'Connell Street on Friday evening just before 6pm - and the queue for the Muslim Sisters of Eire soup run had already reached the corner of the GPO.
The volunteers were unloading boxes and small crates from their trucks. They had everything ready to go: drinks, bread and pastries, insulated food boxes, coolers, and fruit and vegetable crates. A carton box of children’s snacks was later given to a mum with two young children, who put it under her baby’s stroller.
The volunteers were hastily unloading things and moving them to the long table, where the hungry service users were patiently waiting. The man inside the truck told me that Fridays are always the busiest, and he later showed me the queue which was now going beyond the corner.
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I met Sabina Sayed, who has been involved with the charity for more than 10 years now. She told me the soup run has been running for more than six years. They started with 250 meals, and now they have more than 480 every week.
Sabina says: “If you're going to stay here for long, you'll see it'll all be gone in an hour's time. There'll be nothing left to take back.”
The charity volunteers have noticed that more people are coming recently. She added: “It’s not just bachelors now, it's families, it's people with kids – people get their school lunches for their kids from here.”
Running on donations from organisations like Food Cloud and Tesco’s, the charity’s preparation for Friday’s dinner starts in the middle of the week. “From Wednesday, we start asking who's going to be volunteering, who's going to be cooking, how many donations are we getting," Sabina said. "And by Thursday evening we have all the donations and all the numbers completed. And on Friday we are here again.”
Sabina also tells me many of their volunteers used to be service users before. “Now, when they have their own place to stay and they have a stable job, they come here to volunteer with us as well," she said. "So that's something really amazing.”
After my interview with Sabina, a woman named Lorraine, who was coordinating everything, asked me if I wanted to help along. She led me to stand next to a Malaysian girl who told me to put on a hair net, gloves, a neon yellow jacket with the Muslim Sisters of Eire written on the back, a mask, and a plastic apron.
I was to hand out the burgers from the hot box. There were all sorts of people from all sorts of ages, backgrounds and ethnicities but they had one thing in common: they were all hungry.
At some point, a young, blonde girl ran to us, quickly jumped the queue and asked in broken English if this was food. When told that she would have to get in the queue, she ran away.
There were picky eaters who only wanted particular things (one man asked for lasagna and the girl next to me told him jokingly this wasn’t a restaurant). Some wanted halal food (all the food here is halal, the girl next to me told me). Some wanted vegetarian food, others were craving chicken. Most people just took everything we could offer.
A couple of young men started opening the boxes and, after a bit of a commotion, charity workers told them to stop trying to touch the food. The volunteers seemed used to handling situations like these in a calm and humorous way.
One old lady tried coming to the queue twice. Someone from security saw her and stopped a volunteer from giving her a handful of dill, because she had already gone.
There was a man with his ear pressed on the phone asking for two portions, because his girlfriend was in the hospital. He had come in just as the hot section was running out, receiving the last portion of chicken and rice. We opened the hot box lid and showed him it was empty.
Every once in a while, one of the bodyguards would come and announce how many people were left in the queue. 20 or 30 minutes after the start, one of them said “There’s 120 of them, they’re all the way to Pandora”.
The girl next to me told me on their busiest day, there were 400 or maybe even 500 people. Depending on where they were in the queue, people received different rations as the volunteers tried to calculate how to ration the food so that no one was left hungry.
The queue felt never ending. I looked at the girl next to me with concern, as she was pregnant and complained that the baby kicked her. “Do you get any breaks?”
“No, no breaks,” she told me.
The food was finished after just over an hour - and volunteers told the disappointed crowd of roughly 25 people left that there was another soup run just around the corner.
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