Yuan­lin in Chang­hua County used to be known for the sweet preserves it produced, but those glory days have long passed. For some years now, homeless people have gathered near the train station and in the town’s public parks.

Four years ago the Agape Social Welfare Association, which is part of Yuan­lin’s Bread of Life Christian Church, established a shelter named “Warm Home” at the foot of Mt. Bai­guo in the neighborhood of ­Lunya.

The following year, it opened Taiwan’s first food bank to be partly staffed with homeless people. The location also serves as a distribution hub for donated goods from Tai­chung.

“Those who have experienced starvation treasure food more,” says ­Huang Jian­dong, Agape’s director.

Students at the National Yuanlin Vocational High School of Home ­Economics and Business donate leftover food from their lunches to Agape. After being reheated, this food serves as the same day’s dinner for the homeless people at Agape’s shelter.

When you walk into Agape’s food bank, which is only about 350 square feet in area, you discover that it’s really nothing more than a storeroom.

Metal racks are piled with sacks of rice, which account for the lion’s share of the stored food and are arranged according to donor. Some were supplied by the Tai­chung Love Food Bank, some were donated by local individuals and others are disaster provisions supplied by Yuan­lin’s town hall.

Huang Jiandong explains that disaster provisions supplied by the town hall have to sit in the food bank for a year before they can be consumed.

There is also a large quantity of soybean oil bottles. ­Huang explains that one of Agape’s jobs is to prepare meals for the disadvantaged. Consequently, oil and seasonings, in addition to rice, are essentials. For supplies of the latter two items, Agape mostly relies on the Tai­chung Love Food Bank.

Currently, there are 15 people living in Agape’s homeless shelter, all of whom have three meals a day taken care of by Agape. Then there are other itinerant homeless people who come to the shelter each day for meals. Over the course of a year, the shelter provides some 21,000 meals to homeless people.

Seniors living alone and disadvantaged children in Agape’s after-school supplementary classes are regular, long-term recipients of food from Agape. They number over 200.

The varied nutritional needs of the children and elderly that Agape serves cannot be supplied by emergency food banks that themselves lack fresh food.

­Huang explains that food banks have too much of some supplies and too little of others, and these respective surpluses and shortages are impossible to even out. When extra stockpiled food goes bad, it’s a total waste.

In order to make best use of food supplies, Agape immediately passes on most of the white rice that comes in to other social welfare organizations, leaving only what’s necessary for itself in the near term.

Agape also makes use of leftovers from school lunches. With care taken to preserve freshness, these leftovers can provide good tasty meals.

On a Wednesday in June, after lunch at National Yuan­lin Vocational High School of Home Economics and Business, assigned students gather just behind the school’s entrance, carrying boxes of food.

Today, students had a choice of noodles or fried rice, with stewed cabbage or stir-fried vegetables and deep-fried chicken legs or breasts. Now the students have brought out the leftovers from the classrooms. Volunteers organize the food into categories, consolidating them into boxes before turning them over to Agape’s staff to take away.

Agape started to work with that school, as well as National Yuan­lin Agricultural and Industrial Vocational High School, just last year. The organization’s ability to accept leftovers from campuses is unusual among small-scale food banks.

Liu Tsai-tuan, director of student affairs at Yuan­lin Home Economics and Business, says that over 80% of the school’s students are girls, so their appetites are smaller, and there are often substantial leftovers from lunch. Since these are still fresh, clean and appetizing, why let them go to waste? The students and faculty at the school are alike very supportive of supplying the leftovers as a public service to groups helping the disadvantaged.

Huang explains that the schools exercise tight control over their food supplies, so people can rest easy about safety. After the food is turned over to Agape, it is immediately placed in refrigerators and freezers, before it is cooked again or reheated that evening to provide meals to 20–30 people.

Even though the food from the schools is hygienic and poses no safety issues, Huang emphasizes that it is not used to supply meals to the elderly, who require special diets under the direction of a nutritionist.

Agape provides meal delivery services for low-income and lower-middle-income elderly people in five townships: Yuan­lin, She­tou, Yong­jing, Pu­xin and Da­cun. From Monday through Friday it delivers about a hundred boxed meals a day on average. It supplies nearly 32,000 such meals a year, spending more than NT$3 million on food, for which it relies mostly on charitable donations of money.

Agape volunteers deliver food to elderly people in the community. Each meal delivered is an expression of goodwill.

Although Agape’s food bank may have started as little more than a storehouse for food supplies, ­Huang has expanded Agape’s efforts in food beyond the deposits and withdrawals that are characteristic of a food bank, to foster food production and self-sufficiency.

The Sanctuary Farm that Agape operates allows homeless people to raise chickens and grow vegetables. It gives them a sense of self-reliance and provides fresh food that its food bank would otherwise lack.

Sweet potato leaves, water spinach, taro, eggplant, squash… all are grown in Agape’s small farm of a few thousand square meters without the use of pesticides. About 1000 kilograms of vegetables are produced there each year.

The homeless people who are placed in the shelter work the fields. “We don’t just give them food to eat,” says ­Huang. “They’ve got to work, contributing their labor instead of money. And they read the scriptures and work on rehabilitating their minds.”

The 15 homeless people living at the shelter range in age from their thirties to their seventies. Some have lived there for more than two years. During the day, some work in the kitchen, others deliver meals to disadvantaged seniors, and still others work at the farm.

The fresh food brought from the farm to the kitchen is used to create specially prepared meals that suit individual recipients. Take, for instance, the water spinach that the farm raises. Because most of the seniors who receive delivered meals have bad teeth, ­Huang requests that those workers who are responsible for picking the spinach take only the thin necks and tender leaves. What’s left over, along with other kitchen waste, is brought back to the farm to be composted.

 

There are a few foods that Agape spends extra on to increase the nutritional level of its meals, including meat and fish.

Agape has 500 Taiwan silky bantam chickens in the farm’s coops, which its residents never eat. Raising chickens for sale is a way for the organization to help pay for its social welfare work.

The farm workers take food slops, mix in lemon grass and wheat germ, and feed it to the chickens, which are a native Taiwanese breed, twice a day.

Agape looks after the homeless and teaches them to grow their own food and feed themselves. In addition to accepting donations of food, it also delivers these expressions of society’s goodwill to disadvantaged members of society in need of help.

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day,” the saying goes. “Teach him how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Agape does both, charitably supplying both the fish and the fishing rod. May this story of benevolence and this cycle of love at the foot of Mt. Bai­guo in Chang­hua play out in other corners of Taiwan!