Zaid is in early. He’s about to hop into the Addi Road Food Rescue van and do his usual Sunday morning rounds, picking up food from Coles, Woolies and ALDI stores around the Inner West and the City of Sydney LGAs.
It’s rained heavy but the skies are still a while. He likes these kind of mornings, “the roads are quiet, no one much around, it’s nice.”
For Zaid “the work is important. I’ve been at Addi Road for three years now. I like being a driver and I like these Sundays. I get all the food and bring it back. At 2pm our volunteers come and sort through it all, the groceries, the fruit and vegetables.”
The day’s work is aimed at having everything ready for Addi Road’s Food Pantry outlets at homebase here in Marrickville and our sister store over in Camperdown. We’re feeding 8500 people a week now with a steep uptick in people requesting food vouchers. Cost of living pressures, high rents and casualised or unreliable contracted work is leaving people vulnerable and struggling.
Zaid is a bright ray of light in his own small way. He recently got engaged and brought in small cakes for everyone to celebrate his announcement. Before we had finished them he was back out on the road again doing his job.
His Sunday morning work has special importance for him. Maybe it’s the most important day of all in his heart.
“We do the Addi Road school breakfasts on Mondays,” Zaid explains. “We need to have everything right, the fruit and vegetables all sorted, what we are making them. The volunteers need everything delivered here to make good things. The children, they need the bread.”