I met Randeep Lall where he has been most Sunday evenings for the past six years: outside the Zimbabwean embassy on the Strand. Lall, 46, is the founder of Nishkam Swat (the Sikh Welfare and Awareness Team), which has a mission to feed the growing homeless population in the capital and beyond. The Swat operation is not a standard soup kitchen. There are trestle tables on which a range of food options are set out. Hot meals on the evening I visit include curry and rice, pasta and pizza. There are homemade hot samosas and bhajis as well as biscuits and fruit. A line of more than 200 people waits along the pavement here, some carrying the sleeping bags they will bed down in this evening, some alone in their worlds, others chatting and swapping stories.
While they are served, Lall fills me in on the story behind Swat. It started a decade ago in Southall near where he lived. He was in his mid-30s, had not long been made redundant from his job in IT at GlaxoSmithKline. He had made a vow to himself, he says, that he would not return to an office but would live his life in a different way. As part of this plan he initially set up a youth club to help with some of the problems he saw on his doorstep. “At the time I wasn’t so aware of a homeless problem,” he says. “But I was aware that Southall had become known as the heroin capital of the UK. People were coming from all over because there was so much supply and it was so cheap.”
Lall started off doing drug-awareness talks to young people, and in doing so he met some of those living on the streets. The Sikh faith requires its adherents to offer hospitality to those most in need, a commitment called langar. Sikh temples in Southall were feeding many of the homeless every day, but Lall decided langar could be taken out on to the streets.
The first time he came down to the Strand was in September 2012. Lall and some other friends and volunteers served biryani out of the back of a van to 40 or 50 people. It became a weekly thing, and then more regular – three days a week – and they found this pitch outside the embassy where they were not blocking the footpath. Now they sometimes serve 300 people here, and they have other regular sites in Reading, Oxford, Colchester and Brighton.
“We operate 13 times a week in different locations,” Lall says. Swat is entirely a voluntary team and relies on donations from supermarkets and restaurants and wholesalers as well as individuals in the community. He counts on 750 core volunteers plus others who pitch up to help, organising most of it – as he shows me, scrolling down through apps and messages – on his mobile phone. Corporations get involved not only in fundraising but in sending teams to help out with the serving. Social-media campaigns are used to make sure the team always has supplies of what they need. There is a warehouse in Hayes where the food – and clothing donations in the winters – are stored, and nine vans in which it is dispatched.
The food also acts as a bond of trust between Swat and the communities it serves – as becomes clear as I watch the evening’s meals being served, it gives Lall’s team a chance to chat with some of the more desperate and wary individuals, and find out if there are ways to help them get a place to stay or closer to a job. “We have people who have no address from which they can apply for anything, so we can maybe offer that,” Lall says. “Or we can help people get booked on courses, maybe help people with things they need to work, uniforms or safety boots or whatever.”
He has done this for long enough to know there are no simple solutions. “I say to people, if we get one person off the streets and into work in a year then it is worth it. Anything above that is a bonus.”
When he started out a decade ago, he thought he could offer more answers; now, he says, he sees it more as a simple act of compassion. “One change for me was talking to a heroin addict, and he said come and spend an evening or a night with me. It was a cold January night, we were under a bridge, we got there about eight, by 10 we were freezing, by about one I had had enough. He said to me: ‘Now imagine you don’t have the option of going somewhere to a warm bed and someone offers you heroin as an escape from it. After a week of this I bet you will try it. And it works the first time: you can’t feel the cold, you are not hungry. By the third night you are hooked.’”
It took Lall a few years to really understand what empathy meant, he says. “I used to be quite an angry person. According to my wife, I am now 90% less angry. The work has been a gift to me in that way: it has taught me to be compassionate. And non-judgmental. Not only with the homeless but with everyone else I meet.”
He suffered some racism when he was growing up, he explains, but he stresses the importance of making Swat inclusive of all faiths and none. There is no evangelical motivation. This evening the service is being done by volunteers from a local Hindu community.
“There are a few people at the [Sikh] temple who say we should concentrate on helping our own, but these are people who don’t know their own faith,” he says. “I say to them: ‘What did Guru Nanak teach – first you need to love your neighbours, then you need to love humanity.’”
After a BBC report about Swat’s work, Lall has been approached by groups in Australia, Germany, Venezuela, Canada and the US about setting up similar initiatives. There is already a Swat outpost in Buenos Aires, set up by one of their former volunteers. Lall has spent the previous week, he says, trying to write some international guidelines.
He does all this in spare time. His day job is as a support worker, helping young people in local authority care homes from the ages of 16 to 18. Some of the kids he works with help out with Swat, giving them an insight into logistics as well as some of the blunter lessons of life on the streets. Lall’s own two children, also in their teens, help out as well.
I wonder if there will come a point where Swat takes over his life? “It’s not one person,” he insists. “It’s 750 volunteers. People tell me I should take a wage, but I always argue that I don’t need to.” Lall smiles. “I am not greedy, except if there is good food on the table.”
swatlondon.com; Kiran House, Springfield Road, Hayes, UB4 OJT
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