Cakes and Interns

We had been thinking about ways to be a blessing to our neighborhood recently. Lots of people don't even know that there is a church on our street since they don't imagine "church" as meeting in a storefront in a residential neighborhood. When people do talk about us, it's in hushed tones and with a certain level of suspicion. So, we decided to do something "neighborly." There are 8 apartments in the building above our storefront church so we decided to give each of them a cake from the church.

Our interns found a good recipe for chocolate cake and bought a huge bag of flour, lots of cocoa, eggs, sugar, and baking powder. We found some smallish cake forms and went to work baking cakes. We put each cake on a plate that we didn't plan on getting back and took them to church. At church we decorated the cakes with powdered sugar and invited some of the Turkish women to come help us distribute them. The guys waited below in the church while the women went door to door in the building knocking on the doors to present the cakes. Bringing cake to the neighbors is a very Turkish thing to do, but the church had never done anything like that before, so the Turkish women were asking me "What should we say when we knock on the doors?" At first I resisted making any recommendation at all since it's a Turkish tradition after all, but in the end we settled on something simple like "Our church would like to give you this cake as a gift to our neighbors."

Four of the apartments answered the door and three of them accepted the gift. Some of the people were a little suspicious, wondering if we wanted money for the cakes, and one person didn't accept the gift at all. Since we had cakes left over we brought one to an older woman who watches us regularly from her balcony across the street, two went to neighbors in the building next door and we gave one to the shopkeeper down the street.

We bought hard plastic picnic-style plates to put the cakes on and I didn't expect to get them back, but the neighbors wouldn't think of taking a cake without returning the plate. I suppose in hindsight that I should have predicted this. Some of the people asked us to wait while they emptied and cleaned the plate on the spot. It felt awkward to me but it was the neighbors way of discharging their responsibility to us. When the woman across the street asked to give us the plate back right away I replied that there was no need, that if she wanted to give it back to us she could do it anytime. Fifteen minutes later she called us over and gave the plate back full of delicious stuffed peppers and squash. I was glad to have the food, but I realized that this was the cost of not taking the plate right away: the neighbor then felt obligated to return the plate with something on it. So next time I think we'll let them return the plates on the spot.

It was a successful venture, I think. Maybe some walls came down for us in the neighborhood. The shopkeeper told me the other day that he shared the cake with some friends who came to ths shop for tea. They want to know when we plan on doing that cake thing again.