Pick your own pig and mushrooms
As the fax machine whirs and buzzes with incoming bookings, I thought I would take you back to what I was doing two-and-a-half years ago: helping with a project to refurbish parts of an orphanage in Hungary.
The town, Koseg, is not poor by Eastern European standards, and as you walk up the main street you see a full range of consumer goods for sale. These are, however, for the Austrians who cross the nearby border to benefit from the low prices.
The 500 children in the orphanage were using two washrooms with broken sinks, no showers, and drainage that was connected to foul sewers, allowing the stench of waste to permeate the buildings. We took a team of 30 plumbers and other tradesmen to refurbish the communal wash areas - installing showers, new sanitary ware and traps, tiling and Alto floors. I was to feed this team.
The catering provided possibly the greatest insight into life in Koseg: shopping in a supermarket the size of our local 7-11; no trolleys, because most people buy a few carrots or half a loaf; and a worried butcher who sold me his entire stock in one transaction… nine scrawny chickens.
Some things were easy to get - vegetables and fruit, grown by locals in their allotments and sold from chairs outside the houses - while others were almost impossible to find. One was mushrooms: I was surprised to find none available, until it was explained that the locals simply picked their own in the forests.
With three domestic cookers and a hard-working team of builders needing substantial meals, it soon turned into a grand Ready, Steady, Cook. One idea was to make a roast. I was shown the pigs raised by the staff and fed on scraps from the kitchens. I was asked which pig I required, whereupon it was slaughtered.
The director has a budget for feeding the children and paying the staff. Things like maintenance, new light bulbs and so on have to come out of that, and inflation is so high that budgets are tightly stretched.
The really sad thing is that many of the children are simply abandoned by their parents. Imagine living in a town the size of Northampton or Brighton knowing your parents could not afford to keep you and so had abandoned you to the state.
When we go back, I hope that we can create a craft-based training area so the staff can train the children for a trade. As the director said, six years ago he simply had to turn out good little communists; now he has to give them the means to get a job.
ROBERT ALVAREZ is proprietor of Phoenix Catering event caterers in Towcester, Northamptonshire
