Caritas 

#WalshGlobal 3

Noah Drlik

            Being a practicing Catholic means that service to others is at the forefront of my beliefs.  While living and studying in Rome for the next eight weeks I will get to fulfill my service to others through Caritas.  Caritas is an organization run by the Italian Bishops conference that promotes charitable works throughout the Italian community. The Caritas organization we visited was located in Rome about a ten-minute walk from Roma Termini.  This location for Caritas is a soup kitchen focused on feeding the poor.  This Caritas estimates that they feed about four-hundred people a day.  The workers here are all volunteers, mainly retirees that want to lend a helping hand to the Rome homeless.  There are different jobs for each of the volunteers, some include checking in members, distributing food tickets, serving food, and cleanup duty.  The job I got to experience fell under the cleanup duty section.  I was on trash/recycling duty.  My job was to sort the trash and plastic that was leftover by those who ate in the soup kitchen.  It was a gross job, but one that has to be done in order to meet the recycling standards of Italy.  Most volunteers that I got to work with were happy to have me there helping.  The novel, Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, made it seem that non-Italians are not liked by the general Italian population.  The Italians view tourists or immigrants as outsiders and really don’t respect them as much.  Italians show their emotions very well with facial expressions.  They typically don’t smile or say” Ciao” back to an outsider.   However, that was not the case in the soup kitchen. The Italian volunteers treated us with respect and tenderness that I have not really received just walking the streets of Rome.  The typical response from an Italian on the street when I say “Ciao” is that they look ahead and don’t say a word to me.  In the soup kitchen all the workers attempted to talk or interact with me, they saw me as one of their own.  I really enjoyed working with the Italian volunteers, however, I was not the biggest fan for organizing trash.  The people receiving the food were very diverse.  The novel, Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, spoke about how diverse just a little Piazza in Rome can have people that represent most countries of the world.  That case is the same in the soup kitchen.  There were people receiving food and care that stretch from all ends of the earth. It was not just Italians receiving food from Caritas, there were immigrants from Africa, Asia, The Americas, and Europe.  The majority of poor that were fed by Caritas was very gracious of us volunteers.  They knew that we were not required to be there helping them and gave the best present they could offer to us, a simple thank you.  However, in rare cases a few of the people did not treat us volunteers with respect but looking back at it I understand why.  They were most likely embarrassed to be in Caritas reviving free food from a soup kitchen. They just wanted to get in and get out without being noticed, therefore, what seemed to be disrespect was just them protecting themselves from embarrassment.  The Caritas program is one that fulfills the Catholic teaching of service to others and I am very pleased to be a part of this program for the next eight weeks in Rome.