'First Hot Meal': Sikh Volunteers Deliver To Melbourne Tower Lockdown Residents
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The Sikh Volunteers Australia community organisation has been delivering meals to Melbourne locals since the coronavirus outbreak in March.
However, their biggest COVID-19 food drive has just begun at Melbourne’s public housing towers where residents are under an unprecedented police-guarded lockdown that has been likened to being contained in “prison.”
On Sunday the volunteer-run organisation provided 1,325 meals – all funded by donations – to residents in the Flemington and Kensington towers, and on Monday they strived to provide more to meet increased demand.
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“We are preparing 1000 meals for lunch and nearly 1000 more for the dinner, according to their demand,” one of the organisation’s founders, Manpreet Singh, told HuffPost Australia.
“It’s all freshly cooked vegetarian,” he explained, saying meals are made by volunteers in the organisation’s own professional kitchen in Devon Meadows.
He said residents have been grateful for the fresh deliveries, telling him and other volunteers, ‘Thank you, this is the first time we are seeing a hot meal’.
As a migrant who came to Australia in 2005 from Punjab, India, Singh said he understood many culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) residents are used to food from their own culture.
“People are not used to eating from outside for so many days,” he said.
Singh and the other volunteers have set up a table just outside the housing commission buildings, where residents can pick up a container of hot food after getting tested for COVID-19.
“Yesterday [Sunday] morning we decided to go there around 12 o’clock and we prepared 650 meals. We talked to the authorities, they had a...
