In chapter five of #TheDignityProject, Cape Argus deputy news editor Lance Witten spends a day in Masooda Petersen’s kitchen at The Service Dining Rooms.
Cape Town - It is 7.45am and the dappled sunshine from a partly cloudy sky is streaming into the roomy kitchen of The Service Dining Rooms on Canterbury Street in Cape Town’s city centre.
The kitchen staff has already begun preparing lunch, which will be served from 11.30am.
There is no closing time; lunch service is over once the food runs out, usually about 90 minutes later.
They start so early, because they cater for around 700 people daily.
Masooda Petersen barks out orders, but the kitchen is not at all an unpleasant place to be. She’s the kitchen manager and has the ominous task of ensuring 700 meals are ready on time.
Today, it is battered fish, served with rice and smoortjie – a mix of tomatoes, onions, sugar and spices cooked over a slow heat.
“We got a nice donation this week, so we’re making these from frozen.
“The same company donated other frozen stuff, so Friday, there will be burgers,” she laughs.
It’s infectious and the rest of the kitchen staff laugh along with her.
Petersen joined The Service Dining Rooms in 2013.
Before that, she was an area manager for a popular fast-food chain, managing three or four stores in the Table View and Milnerton area.
“When I applied for this job, I thought this was a fancy place. The Service Dining Rooms. Sounds posh. After the first interview, I said to my husband ‘I’m not so sure I want to come back here. Look at the clients they have.’ And he told me I would be surprised.”
She was. She said working for the fast-food company was stressful and struggled to motivate herself to go to work.
“But now I’m here early every day, rain or shine. I love these people, they are my people.”
Between 200 and 250 homeless or transient people file through the dining area daily at lunchtime.
That is after the 400 or so who come in between 6.30am and 7am for coffee service.
“It is a rand a coffee and a rand a plate of food,” Petersen says. “But they can also pay with tokens.”
Tokens are handed out at various shelters, which offer bathrooms, and at clinics where street people can collect medication.
“So you get a token if you have a bath, a token if you do your laundry, a token if you go for a check up, a token if you fetch your medicines.”
It is a way of promoting health, a reward of sorts for staying clean and healthy.
“Why must you waste a day doing laundry or taking time out of the skarrel to have a bath?
“But this way, they know at least they can get lunch if they do those things.”
Petersen has five staff members and a driver, but the kitchen is also staffed by volunteers from the streets.
“I love this one,” she says, pointing to a woman hobbling through the kitchen, wearing a sparkling minstrel’s hat.
“When she first came here, she stank of liquor. She used drugs… I worked with her and now she comes to work on time every day. Every day she’s here at 6am.
“She fetches things from the storeroom, she cooks, she cleans. We all work as a team here.”
Petersen shouts from the dining room into the kitchen: “Are we done here yet?”
“We need more salt,” comes the reply.
She excuses herself. Following her into the kitchen, we watch as she dances between pots of frying fish and checks on the massive 80l vats of rice, soya mince and soup on the boil.
“There’s no set menu here. You must just work with what you’ve got. Sometimes I’ll go to (operations manager) Greg (Andrews) and ask him if maybe there is a little bit of money for vegetables. They love their vegetables.” Often, however, it is variations of soya mince that gets served up.
“They get so gatvol of soya. If I must give them soya every day, they will say ‘Masooda! This is not on’,” she chuckles.
The soya that’s on the boil is for the 500 or so “off-site clients”, as Petersen calls them.
People from around the city come to collect food from her kitchen to hand out as part of their own feeding schemes. Petersen doesn’t charge for this service.
Meals are served with two rolls, donated daily by the Haven Night Shelter in Napier Street.
A number of retailers also drop off their waste products that have passed their sell-by dates, but are still safe for consumption.
She’s got a group of young mothers who come in off the street between coffee and lunch service: “Those klonkies climb into my heart. I need to take care of them.”
There’s an upmarket retailer that delivers baby food and some supplies for babies and toddlers that Petersen gives to the mothers who come to see her.
“I get paid to do my job, which is running the kitchen, keeping an eye on the stock, but this is my way of giving back. Those young mothers also need a helping hand. Some of them have given birth on the street.”
Catering for so many people is no easy feat, but Petersen and her team are ready to serve at 11.30am sharp.
“We clean as we go,” she says, pointing to the floor that remains spotless despite 10 pairs of feet rushing over them, oil splatter from the frying fish and drops of soup and water from the massive vats.
“I am cooking six 20l pots of soya, which will be mixed with pasta and sent off or collected. I also have an 80l vat of soup going for off-site clients and an 80l vat of rice boiling to go with the fish, with that lekker smoortjie over it – my mother’s recipe,” she winks.
It is 11.15am and the queue outside The Service Dining Rooms stretches from the gate to the back entrance, in front of the adjacent building, to around the corner of the next side street.
The crowd is restless, but the fragrance wafting from inside the kitchen keeps the mood jovial.
“That doesn’t smell like soya. Ons eet lekker vandag (We will eat well today),” says one man, rubbing his hands together.
Shorty, a car guard on Canterbury Street keeps the queue in check, threatening them light-heartedly with a broomstick. The gates open and the crowd rushes in. They file in orderly, reaching the counter to hand over their R1 coin or blue, red or orange plastic token, collect their food and sit down.
There’s a din in the dining room, as their voices accompany the sounds of melamine plates scraping across the wooden tables, shouts filtering in from inside the kitchen and the counter service ladies calling for speedier delivery.
Once the clients have eaten, they scrape off what little remains into large plastic drums, before dropping their plates off at the end of the counter.
There, one of the volunteers collects the stacks of plates, carrying them off to the scullery to be scrubbed.
By now, this is the only place in the kitchen you’ll find a bit of mess on the floor.
“Clean as you go,” bellows Petersen, picking up a mop.
“If you make a mess here, I am not going to tell you to clean it up. And I expect that if you see a mess, you will clean it up. We help each other out here.”
The dining room is decorated with art by some of the street people and inspirational messages reading: “You are worthy of being loved” and “everyone is beautiful”.
It looks like a brightly decorated school classroom.
In the small courtyard behind the dining room are three restrooms and an outdoor basin where they can freshen up and fill their water bottles.
“Okay,” she shouts through the service hatch. “Ons is klaar! Kos is op! (We are done! There is no more food!).”
She closes the hatch and dusts off her hands. She will now plan the next day’s meal, do a stock take and assist where she can in the front office.
By 4pm, Petersen is on her way home, to return at 6.30am the next day.
“I can’t take a sick day. The people will ask where I am. They like my food,” she says with a smile.
Cape Argus