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Success Stories
"Chicken Soup for Communities"
The Sequel to “All the Way to China”
A Recent project of Stuff Canada
January 2001
Eat your chicken soup! It’s good for you. It builds…community.
To illustrate.
Isabel Fryszberg, the artistic director of Creative Works met David and Deborah Cooper of STUFF CANADA at the Annual Ontario Healthy Communities Coalition in November 2000. David and
Deborah then came to visit Mustard Seed, the store on Queen East that Creative Works a St. Michael’s Hospital Inner City Health Initiative, shares with the Sisters of St. Joseph. The couple saw how
people challenged with mental and physical illness can transform the raw ingredients of their lives into paintings and pottery, above all, into community and communication.
The room was awash
with colour: a playful banner of shoes announced the theme of this year’s art show and calendar: Roots of Community, Routes to Community. A woman only 2 ½ years in Canada, who had neither spoken
English nor painted before she fled death threats to her family, was putting eloquently in acrylic the miracle of what can be wrought when you find a community that enables you to express that pain
and accompanies you through it.
Mingled with the smell of paint were whiffs of ginger, garlic and chicken. Sister Gwen Smith was behind the wide counter that separates the open community
kitchen from the studio. She and members of the group who meet weekly to cook together were preparing…what else… chicken soup* for the upcoming Feast of Light. The participants of the various
programs as well as neighbors were to get together to celebrate the miracle of Light. There will be a sun candle for winter solstice, a menorah for Hannukah, an Advent wreath for Christmas, tapers,
stories of personal light, and celebratory song.
Oh, and then Chicken Soup!
The only problem is… they have only 8 soup bowls.
David asks Sister Gwen to fax her wish list to Stuff
Canada.
“30 Soup Bowls.”
“Well, STUFF loves to connect things like chicken soup with soup bowls”, says David. It just so happens that Dinetz Resturant Supplies have donated cases of
dishes which we have passed on to Homes First Society to divide up among various charities. Call Gabriella at Homes First.”
It would have been enough had Gabriella only shared the soup bowls,
but she added a case of matching cups and saucers and delivered them to the door.
Now Sister Gwen loves the story of “Bone Button Beet Borscht”( if you’ll pardon mixing the minestrones), so
like the tailor in the story, she said to Gabriella, “Very Good. But perhaps… a few matching dinner plates would make it better. And the day after Feast of Light, we are inviting people with no
families in for a “family” Christmas dinner…”
And the plates came. And the people came. The chef was a street man, “Stan”, who had offered Mustard Seed his skills as a professional chef. He
was in his glory showing the tricks of the trade to his sous-chefs from the community kitchen. And of course, the bones and the bits went into the big pot donated by “Eric the Biker” around the
corner. And what came out was, well, not chicken soup, but its cousin, turkey soup, for the first Psalm’ n Soup gathering of 2001.
The beauty is that this soup nurtures community among all
these people. David Cooper keeps a eye on the process. And when the bone soup concocter says, “Ah. Very good. But it could be better, if only we had a little…” the needs are met and the
community grows.
*Fear not, chicken soup purists: no added mustard in Mustard Seed’s chicken soup. Though we love our name, suggesting a tiny beginning capable of becoming a tree, we don’t add
it to every dish!
** For the information of prairie Canadians… the “salvadora persica” variety of mustard actually does grow to a small tree. Photograph of one in the Negev can be sent upon
request from queen.bee@on.aibn.com or 753 Queen Street East., Toronto, M4M 1H3 or (416) 465-6069…if only we had a scanner…………………..
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