2.0
Meals on wheels since last 3 years has more been a journey within myself than out there on the streets.
I still remember the first time when we hit the streets, I was reflecting for a long time that, why did it make me feel sad after I came back from serving the food? I still hold that question.
Over the years, it has been a reflective journey for a lot of volunteers like me. The idea of meals on wheels was never to become an organization or a centralized model but to be more and more decentralized. I always loosly held these thoughts but never knew this lingo of centralization and decentralization, Thanks to Moved by love people that I’m finding my path with this tiny labour of love. The path we all volunteers are exploring is more or less the same and hence we thought may be we could make this a little more reflective and a space for self exploration along with our labour of love service.
We were deeply inspired with idea of circles from a few friends who started MOW in Mumbai. This week, we held 3 circles in the process. I will share my reflections in the later part.
Opening Circle
we opened with 10 minutes of silence.
Since we were all old volunteers, we opened with a question “What brings us all here?” the following reflections deeply resonated with all of us,
Voulnteer1 (V1) :
Well, it has been some journey for me and what bring me here is the fact that all of us are so genuine in the process that we do not seek any validation from the outside world, and I do something that deeply resonates with me. I love the fact that we do not click any picture of post anywhere on the social media, this itself says that we are content and its an intrinsic motivation that brings us here. For me this space has told me the difference between distributing and serving
V2 :
I like the fact that this is ultra local and not the typical CSR where we do things just for the sake of it. I always had the idea of doing something for the greater good but I wanted to be grounded, this keeps me just there. I was not there for last few weeks, busy with my own complications and I terribly missed this Sunday, I’m glad that I’m here today
V3:
I like the authenticity with which we do things, this has a sense of family and shared by V2, this does not feel like a CSR
V4:
For me it always has been about making connections with the people out on the streets, Daily I have dinner with my family, but I want to keep at-least a day aside where I connect with people outside, the greater family
V5:
My journey of self inquiry and inner transformation started with MOW, I was associated with another group in pune that served people on streets but I always thought something was missing, when I came here 7 months ago, I could connect to serving food in a very different way, we serve food with so much of humility and that is what keeps me bringing back.
V6:
‘m a very different person by nature and I never connect to words like 'Consiousness’ , ‘Service’ but still I keep coming here and the fact of this remains that we are very grounded and working at zeroth level and we do not want to ‘scale-up’
Post this cooked rice and ‘Aalo-tamatar’ sabji and thought that we would have dinner on streets with people whom we serve, that was our second circle.
We served food at a particular place and asked if we could join them while dining, a few agreed and here we were 13 people in circle (volunteers included).
We received so much love and they welcomed us with a big smile after our request to sit together, Everyone got busy in putting their bed-sheets on the streets as they felt a little uncomfortable wanting to make us sit on the streets but in a moments time every was comfortable sitting together with or without bed-sheet.
We played the name-memory game, had casual chats with all, asked them what do they do, how the day was, played with kids. One person was telling her story of how her day was, she started her day at 5:00 with collecting garbage and then coming home, washing utensils, clothes, making little food and having it then. Another person shared about the fact that they’d just come from market buying a few household things and were hungry and had to cook food and then eat. This couple had 3 kids, they were very joyful and we had ‘masti’ time with the kids. A grandma, after being served, thanked us and blessed us with sort of teary eyes. And I wondered who received?
We thanked everyone (the people and volunteers) for spending their quality time with us and got up to leave, at the very moment, an on looker, a 18-20 yr old kid who was watching this since last 15-20 mins, came to us and said ‘I want to join you guys, I love what you all are doing’, this guy stays in pune and was there just for sometime and was waiting for a bus back home. He sees us, comes to us and was literally shivering with joy, we asked him what do you liked about here? He said “the fact that you sat together and spent times is what I loved the most, I want to join you all and experience this” He went on to say “If you guys do it on a saturday, I will take a half day off and join you guys, I just want to come”. We hugged him tight, while he was taking one of our volunteer’s number, we saw that his hands were still shivering. I don’t know how to acknowledge his spontaneity and courage. I then felt, may be he is moved by love :)
Closing circle :
We opened with a minute of silence,
We were all beaming and overflowing with love, and we opened the circle of reflections about our ‘aaha’ moments for the day
V1 :
When our volunteers refused to sit on bed-sheet while they were sitting on ground, I don’t know who noticed, but there was a big smile on face of one of the lady, I liked the fact that we sat together and introduced this new format for meals on wheels
V2 :
I loved the fact that we were super local and I was moved by the energy of everyone around me
V3:
I always wanted to do this, I always wanted to have conversations but we never could do it, I’m happy that we did it today.
V4:
I’m being very selfish here, but this brings out a long term motive within me to do something for the old people and I will do it soon. I also, realized that we have to be really sensitive with the questions we ask people, we have to be careful that we do.
V5:
That guy brought the biggest smile on my face. The fact that he wanted to be a part because we spend time connecting brought that smile on my face. I agree with V4 that we have to very careful with the questions and I was glad that this was brought out in the circle.
We closed with a moment of silence followed by ‘Loka samastha"
Over all it was a good process of stepping up and I feel we probably moved towards 2.0 :)