Group serves up thousands of hot meals to Australians and international students in needDuring the pandemic, the United Sikhs and Sikh communities have been vital in organising food relief in some of Victoria’s most economically vulnerable areas. At the Wyndham Park community centre in Melbourne,they have been providing hundreds of hot meals a week.
“My mantra is if you want anything done you get the Sikhs involved,” says Greg Ferrington, who managers the centre. “They can just put a list up on Facebook and within 24 hours they can turn it around and get what they need, that’s just the ethos in the community.”
Among those the Sikh community has been helping in Australia are international students, who have been widely excluded from government assistance.
Jatinder Singh, a master’s student at Victoria University, lost his job at a restaurant when the lockdown began and, within a few weeks, he and his roommates were struggling to buy food.
“I was still having to pay rent and pay my university fees … We thought we might need to cut out our meals,” he says. “I was thinking like, ‘Man, I’m gonna have just one meal a day.’
“I was thinking maybe I can get some money from family back home but in India it is worse, they have lost their jobs and, with the lockdown, they can’t even get to the bank … I can’t even fly home”.
Jatinder found the United Sikhs through Facebook, filled out their form and the next day two bags of groceries were dropped off at his door. “To be honest I was crying … it’s been really really bad.”
The student is Sikh himself but the vast majority of the students and families they have fed are not.
Though religious-based charities are commonplace, Sekhon says sometimes people worry that the United Sikhs have ulterior motives for helping.
“It has come up and we have been addressing it, but there are no pamphlets or anything that we are handing out that tell people who we are, or anything that could possibly try and convert anyone at all,” Sekhon says. “If people have questions then we will answer them, but that’s all.”
Singh says the organisation is working to become more widely accepted within Australia.
“We want to be part of the mainstream. People do look on us in a different way but we want to just remove those differences. Like, ‘Hey, we look different but we want to be part of the community, we want to help create a better community for the future.’”
While some Bairnsdale locals were tentative at first, Sekhon says by the end of the bushfire crisis his team were part of the community.
“For the first two or three days, it was about building the relationship but then we mingled in together and it was sort of like a family situation,” he says. “By the end we didn’t want to go back, even though we had family waiting for us. It was like a second home for us.
“We still get messages saying thank you and people posting to Facebook to remind others that if they are ever in need that the Sikh community or your local Sikh temple will give you whatever you need, or whatever they possibly can give you.”
The United Sikhs volunteers in Bairnsdale: ‘We want to be part of the mainstream.
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