Overview
I, along with two of my friends had got in touch with one of my friends' cousins. That cousin happened to run a charity organisation called Birds of Passage. Birds of Passage is an organisation that feeds the homeless at Woolloomooloo every Monday night. My friends and I had planned to help out with the preparation and serving of food to the homeless every second Monday. Woolloomooloo is home to a large number of homeless people, so working there was going to be a completely authentic experience, as the Birds of Passage team sets up their facilities right in the heart of the homeless dominated area of Woolloomooloo.
Reflection
Working with the BOP team was a great eye-opener for me. Before this, I had never really been able to interact with homeless people before, and so by serving food to them, I was able to properly understand who those people really were. I found that many of these people didn't look like homeless people at all, and at one point I was questioning whether some of them were even homeless at all. A surprising number of them were eager to talk to me about what I had learned about the homeless while I was serving them, this really helped me make sense of many of these people's situations. I am eager to hopefully work with the team again in the future.