“Can you help impeach Bush?” the woman with a cane asked, as her table of four was leaving.  I laugh and tell her, “Actually, we only serve food at Karma Kitchen.”  On her way out, the woman smiles, “Just wondering. Since you’re doing such a fine job in promoting abundance and love, I just thought I’d ask.”

It was a fine night at Karma Kitchen -- a waitlist for couple hours straight, more than 85 “thali” orders, highest tally of contributions to date, and ten volunteers with exhausted-yet-refreshed smiles on their faces. :)  And by 9:30PM, we had to stop accepting new guests because we were practically scrapping the bottom of the pots!

I don’t know what it is, but something about Karma Kitchen is contagious.  “There’s so much love here, I can feel it,” a young girl says.  Her table-of-four twenty-somethings are part of a nonprofit fellowship to serve the community for a year.  “I just moved here last week, and I feel like I’ve hit the jackpot here!  Back in Pennsylvania, we used to call it ‘living-with-open-hands’ – this whole idea of trust.” (Next morning, she signed up to volunteer.)

And that love was oozing out to the waitlisted folks too.  An Iranian family drove their minivan for more than an hour to dine at Karma Kitchen, because “a friend insisted we have to have a meal here.”  While they waited, I explained the tricky geometry problem of getting their table of six.   A sixth-grader amongst them immediately offered help -- “I can help.  I’m very good at Math.”

Even if you can’t grasp it intellectually, the tornado of selfless offerings sucks everyone in. 

“So wait, if there are no prices, how much do I give?  How much does my meal actually cost?”  “No, no.  That’s exactly the point.  Your meal is a gift from someone you don’t know, and then it’s up to you to pay-forward whatever you’re moved to offer.”  He still didn’t get it.  “Dad, it’s like a donation,” his daughter chimes in with a proud I-get-something-Dad-doesn't-understand look.  Dad nods his head in disbelief, “Well, okay.”  By the end of his Karma Kitchen visit, though, he knew that everyone serving him was a volunteer, he knew about the rather tasty four-course meal, he knew that everyone picked-up and dropped-off things on the activities-table without any charge, he knew that he had to take his envelope and drop it in the tall, black box and that no one would ever figure out how much he gave.  It’s hard to say if he truly got it, but it wasn’t hard for him to say, “I’ll be back.”

Conceptually, it’s the gift-economy idea.  Gastronomically, it’s the yum-yum, Nepali-Indian food.  But ultimately, it’s the volunteers who are the lynchpin of the whole enterprise.

Volunteers steal the show – and not because they’re extra-ordinary, but precisely because they’re ordinary, unique, human.  We have no corporate headquarters to get volunteers oriented in the ways of Karma Kitchen; they get a one-hour orientation prior to starting.  We don’t have cookie-cutter uniforms so everyone can look the same; all they get is a brand-less apron to hold their order slips and a request to put on a big smile.  We don’t have standard lines to greet guests; they are asked to respond dynamically from the heart.  It’s all rather un-choreographed, un-rehearsed, and … well, human.  It’s subtle, but that’s the magic.

Outside of the chef, everyone is a volunteer.  It takes about a hundred hours to put on one of these nights.  It’s hard work, but the return on investment is priceless.

When you volunteer, you notice subtle things that you might miss otherwise.  You notice how an elderly woman carefully guides her blind husband to his seat; you notice how no one will ever see the volunteer who spent his labor-day-weekend Saturday-night doing dishes in the back for six hours, you notice that someone dropped in a Bart-pass as their offering, you notice that a young man waited outside for an hour -- with his date, you notice that a due-any-day pregnant mother’s husband went out to get some groceries for getting us some supplies, you notice that two friends volunteer to move to a “community table” so we can seat more guest at their table, you notice that a Sufi woman gently placed three plastic-wrapped DVD’s of the movie One on the activities table, you notice that couple volunteers skipped their meal so one or two more guests could have a dining experience, you notice the joy of satisfying the insatiable appetite of college students, you notice a 44-year-old man explaining the gift-economy idea to his 4 year old nephew at their table-of-2.  You notice these things.

Two out-of-town women are so bowled over that they are taking photographs of everything.  Another table asked for an extra “$0.00” receipt as a souvenier.  A friend-guest at a table says, “Oh you’re out of ice? I’ll go get some.”  A couple waiting for a table, says, “Go ahead, seat these other guests first.  We don’t mind waiting.”  Left on a table is a handwritten note: “Thank you.  I feel blessed.”

An artist who joined us, pointed us to an article he’d written, that concluded with:

I encourage you to learn a tale you love and put it in your own words. Sew it to the fabric of your own heart, season it with your own experiences, and tell it to someone you care about. Or take an event that happened in your own life and give it life by telling it again. If you tell of your problem and how you overcame it—no matter what the resolution—you will teach others something, and they will learn to recognize your path: whether to follow or avoid it. If we re-infuse our culture with stories, our need will gradually get met without television or video games, without shiny shoes that make us feel like heroes or costly cars that give us the illusory mask of a champion.

At Karma Kitchen, everyone takes home a story.  Eat here, stories to go.