FIGHTING POVERTY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 4 July 1928, Page 3

FIGHTING POVERTY.

RELIEF IN AUCKLAND. In a tiny chapel in an Auckland building Holy Communion is being celebrated by a little band of devout people. Beyond the wall free soup is being issued to hungry men whose haunting eyes of woes reveal the horror of the actual'breadline. It is the headquarters of the Anglican City Mission in Wellesley Street West, and the hour before noon. The people of the chapel celebrating the holy rite in the soup laden atmosphere represent the spearhead of the movement, of which the good Samaritan must be the patron saint, designed to fight poverty in its most primitive form. Many hold theories about the pauperising effect of charity, but in the face of the men who sit on the forms supping soup out of huge mugs these theories are liable to vanish from the mind. V hatever the cause of this poverty, the hungry must be fed, and the soup kitchen, with its shins of beef and piles of bread and its row of bubbling cauldrons of the kind .of soup that is a whole meal, lias ,a sanctity closely related to that of the little chapel where the symbolical bread and wine bring spiritual nourishment to the servants of the Master.

The soup kitchen has been ‘ running •continuously since April of last year, the average number of people so fed each .day 7 being from 300 to 400, although on some days this week 400 has been exceeded. On Wednesday they speak of a “record,” a saddening record indeed. Practically everyday since {the kitchen was opened Nurse Jones has superintended the work, and her book of daily attendances shows that even on Christmas Day over 200 people had their midday meal there. Poverty is rife in Auckland just now as a result of the unemployment and the soup kitchen is carrying on a courageous work in the effort to bring a smaill ray of sunshine into many drab lives.