Usually, if they have enough, Valbona and Anxhela go back and forth on the hotel stairs “with their arms full of saucepans”. To make meals, the two Albanian mothers huddle together in the small kitchen of the establishment, where places are expensive. But not on the days when the Solidatruck arrives on the forecourt and deploys its small removable staircase leading to a fully equipped kitchen.
This heavyweight fitted out by the food bank is one of the new “third places” tested in Toulouse to “promote access to food” for the homeless, and more specifically for families or isolated people housed by the prefecture in suburban hotels, for lack of places in the emergency shelters. In the Pink City, they are “about 2,000” in this case, living almost exclusively in their rooms. “Without a kitchen area, sometimes without a microwave”, underlines Daniel Rougé, the social affairs assistant, who sees in the Solidaritruck “the opportunity to send a message about healthier food” and to “find a form of ‘autonomy’.
“When the truck is there, we eat much better”
Concretely, since February, the white truck has parked on a fixed day in front of one of the seven hotels on its tour, in Balma, Cornebarrieu or even, like Tuesday, in Saint-Martin-du-Touch. He brings with him daily foodstuffs – potatoes, meat, a very extensive collection of spices. “And the participants complete with the ingredients they have in their room,” explains Justine, the association’s social worker. France Skyline, in charge of the management of this kitchen on wheels. Then, “everyone brings their ideas”, adds a pinch of “their culture” and large family dishes come out of the oven. “Of course, they don’t wait for us to eat and go to other places of food aid,” admits Emilie Mège, integration coordinator at France Horizon. “But when the truck is there, we always eat much better,” says Matilda, Valbona’s teenage daughter. During the last Solidaritruck visit, his mother even prepared “boxes” for an acquaintance who lives in a squat.
At the beginning of the device, Justine, her colleague Clarisse, and Dimitri, in civic service, knocked on the doors of the rooms, with a pastry for example, when they arrived. “We always do it but we realize that the regulars are coming back and that there are also new faces, which is a good sign”, confides Justine. In Saint-Martin, it was even necessary to establish three slots on registration, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., otherwise you could no longer stir your quiet pan in a kitchen on wheels as crowded as that of the adjoining hotel on other days. In the “truck”, we obviously talk about recipes – the speakers do not fail to write down some of them in their notebooks – but also babies to come, school, birthdays. Cooking, essential, also serves “as a pretext to talk about other more serious problems”. This is what Daniel Rougé calls “going towards” to renew a dialogue with people who, very often, with this temporary accommodation, break the thread with social services.
The truck, cleverly arranged, can accommodate cultural activities in its living room at the end of which Anthony, municipal digital adviser, puts his computers down, part-time, in a small office. Its mission: “Bridging the digital divide”. “For now, I’m doing upgrades, I’m helping to understand the administrative sites, but maybe later I’ll have more specific requests,” says the technician. The sideboard also sometimes turns into a thrift store. There is another room at the end, with a water point. And when there is no meditation workshop, the objective is to take health personnel on board. Solidarity has two years to find the right ingredients.