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My experience as a volunteer in Porto: CASA- Centro de Apoio ao Sem Abrigo

During your Erasmus period in Porto, you can participate in various volunteer projects. It’s an enriching experience and I would recommend everybody to try it at least once.

I worked as a volunteer in Porto for several months, and I have to admit that I still miss this work. I did the voluntary work at CASA – Centro de Apoio ao Sem Abrigo. As the name tells, CASA is a supportive organization to help the homeless. CASA provides food to these people (dinner, as well as a package with usually bread, yoghurt, fruit and a cake for the next day) and the organization functions from Monday until Friday.

An evening at CASA

How does an evening at CASA look like? Every day around 8 p. m. everybody gathers in the kitchen of CASA. Every volunteer group consists of around 12 people (there are various groups for different days, most of the people work twice a week, which is around 6 hours per week). Some people are responsible for bringing the food to the kitchen: fruits, yoghurt, bread, cakes and other things like pizza and sandwiches that were left-overs from several restaurants are collected and brought to the CASA kitchen. When all the food has arrived, the tasks are split. One part of the group unfolds the napkins that are later used to wrap the food in. Another part of the group cuts the bread and provides it from (usually) marmalade. Others wrap the food and again other people put the various foods together in a plastic bag which are called ‘kits’. Besides, there are some people preparing the dinner (usually soup, pasta or rice and to drink juice or water and a piece of cake with coffee as a dessert).

When everything is prepared, usually around 21. 15-21. 30 it is time to go to the streets. The volunteer group is split in two and the groups go to different streets, all by car. The moment we arrived at the streets, there usually was a big line of people, waiting for their meals. When they saw us arrive, some of them came running to our cars to help take all the stuffs out (the tables, the water cans, and all the food). As soon as the tables were fixed and the food was on top of it, we were ready to serve the plates. There is always a lot of food, people can even come for a second round. People are eating together on the street and the atmosphere is usually very pleasant; the homeless and the volunteers chat and laugh with each other. During my work period there I had several conversations with the people. When you go weekly you start to know each other and the talking goes more easily.

There are various kinds of people that come to get food at CASA: homeless people (with sometimes an alcohol or drug addiction), single moms with many kids or more ordinary people who suddenly lost their jobs. So it doesn’t mean that all the people that come to eat at CASA have no home, a lot of them just don’t have enough money to provide themselves or their families from food. I once talked with someone who told me he was a great student, but he was very short of money and decided to come to CASA for food. It’s a sad situation. People come to CASA principally for food, but you can see that some of them have the need to talk, so they talk to the volunteers. All volunteers are very sympathetic, empathic and they are good-listeners. Sometimes the people don’t necessarily want to talk about themselves or their situation, sometimes they just like to know about you and what you are doing. Sometimes the volunteers – besides the food - bring clothes or accessories for the house to distribute on the streets to the people.

Interview with the director of CASA

For my blog I wanted to do a small interview with the current director of CASA. His name is Pedro Pedrosa, a funny, cheerful and very sympathetic young man. Here is my conversation with Pedro:

Ambra: Can you tell me how CASA started?

Pedro: CASA is a project that started in Lisbon, and it was inspired by a Buddhist monk called Tulku Pema Wangyal Rinpoche. Pedro Nicolau (the founder of CASA Porto) from Porto went to Lisbon, and asked if the same project could be applied in Porto. When it started there were several groups of friends, one for each day of the week, going to the streets giving food and talking with the homeless. It started on the 3rd of March of 2007. Nowadays it’s the biggest organization that works with homeless people in Portugal. When we started in Porto, there were not many people who gave food to homeless on the streets, neither were there many people coming to get some food. Now we are helping more than 200 homeless people per day.

Ambra: What motivated you to start to work for CASA in Porto? Where there some specific (personal? ) reasons? I would like to know what led you to make that decision.

Pedro: It didn’t have a specific motivation. I wanted to do something for other people, and to me there were not many people doing that.

Ambra: Very well. Could you tell me a little bit about the organizational part? The amount of food that has to be prepared, the amount of the ‘kits’…

Pedro: It’s a statistical work. We know how many plastic plates we spend, and how many groups we have. With all of that together and with the count of the kits and food, we can estimate a very accurate number.

Ambra: Do you have the feeling that a lot of the people that come to CASA feel the need to talk with someone? Or do they only come there for their primary need (food)? What is your experience with that?

Pedro: There are some who feel more comfortable talking with the volunteers than others, and regarding those ones the volunteers should try to listen to what they want to tell. That is one of our goals too, listening to these people’s stories, but when we have so many people eating the talks usually are quite short. Right now it is not the same thing as a few years ago. Now I spent a lot more time talking than giving food! In the beginning we gave food to around 40 or 50 people per day, so it was easier to have a conversation and to help people also in other ways. Because the number of people eating on the streets increased so fast, we created the project CASA AMIGA. In order to diminish this number on the streets we started to give uncooked food to some of them with the CASA AMIGA project. They can cook this food at home and they do not need to come to the street, so that we are more able to efficiently help the ones that are on the streets. Right now we are giving baskets of food to more than 200 families. They can pick up these baskets every Saturday at our warehouse or we deliver them at their homes.

Pedro told me that soon there will be a big cantina for the homeless to eat their meals, so that they don’t need to eat on the streets anymore.

I am very thankful that people like Pedro exist. I would like to personally thank Pedro for what he accomplished regarding CASA. You are doing something incredible and amazing for the human kind and I bet there are hundreds (if not more) people very thankful for your actions! Keep up the great work, and soon I will visit CASA again.

One more time I would like to encourage people to do or try voluntary work. You are not paid in money, but you are paid with love. Volunteer and make a difference.

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give" - Winston Churchill

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