In our endeavor to follow the dictates of the Siddhas tasking us to feed the hungry, we came across many objections and views on providing food to the homeless. Many felt we were encouraging the homeless to be lazy and dependent on handouts. Some were against distributing food to the addicts. We faced the question of when would the feeding end if it would ever end; whether this would eradicate poverty; and whether it would help change their lives.
Although these are reasonable questions we chose not to go into any form of debate but just carry out what has been tasked to us as directed by Agathiyar.
When we had no answers and statistics on these matters, I came across the following article at https://www.jirehshope.com/posts/818. Kechara an established Soup Kitchen has the answers to these questions.
Kechara is about 100 volunteers strong and has 13 various departments. They provide 2,500 meals to the homeless in Malaysia every week through their soup kitchen programme, and they also serve up to 500 families on a weekly basis through dry provisions and surplus food.
Kechara serves the homeless once a day on weekdays from their soup kitchens. On weekends, they venture out to poorer areas with food sets and a mobile medical & response team to help those who are sick, ill or to provide them with other relevant assistance.Aside from the soup kitchens, Kechara also serves urban poor families in the peninsular through their food bank program. This programme helps needy families through monthly dry food provisions and also through surplus food that's collected from hotels and hypermarkets.Currently, they collect surplus food from 45 Tesco stores nationwide, and they help redistribute it to those in need near the stores’ location.
Currently, they support 500 families on a weekly basis along with 70 of their NGO partners.
To provide the above services effectively and efficiently, they have put together a web app after years of doing charity and providing various other services.
Kechara registers each of these individuals so that they can keep track of them in a long term basis, and also to filter out the ones that don't really need their food. Kechara tries to discover solutions that helps get them off the streets through employment, welfare or medical assistance, shelter placement and more.Today they have the necessary statistics on the homeless.
Through this app they've discovered that 83.7% of them were actually school dropouts. 79% of them were from underprivileged backgrounds. Out of that, 34.7% revealed to be ex-convicts or drug offenders from troubled families.They found the reasons for people to end up on the streets.
It's generally a result of poverty. Other factors that often contribute to homelessness also include social issues, disabilities, and unfortunate upbringings. Weak family support systems that provide little to no help further increases the risks of such individuals ending up homeless. Most of the homeless are out there because of their circumstances and not by choice.Their findings shock us.
In fact, one of Kechara’s unexpected experiences was meeting those that were dressed decently but were actually homeless. This included professors, doctors, ex-lawyers, government servants, and even chief editors who were out on the streets. This addresses the common misconception that homelessness is caused by laziness.Kechara has no intention to stop helping the unfortunate. Its founder summarizes it well.
As Kechara’s founder wisely says, you can “Choose to be part of the problem or part of the solution”.