We continue our series on the ordinary Malaysian out to make Malaysia a better place. We visit Joycelyn Lee at the Pit Stop Cafe, a community-based project with a slight difference.

JOYCELYN Lee seems to be addicted to being brain-dead and physically exhausted.

What other conclusion can one draw? Look at her career path after school. After fifteen years a journalist, the adrenalin-junkie was burnt out on a pressing daily deadline of the next story, the next byline, and grouchy, demanding editors.

Then was planted the seed of Pit Stop Community Café, the outfit she heads now with Andrea Tan Mei Suan.

“I was taught, right from the start, a journalist must always be objective. We never get our hands dirty. Even when advocating something, there is always a remove,” said Lee.

After she left the journalism industry, Lee jumped into corporate media communications for nine years and spent her days and nights churning out glossy platitudinous prose about progress and achievemement.

She then decided that she wanted to be engaged actively and positively in the community, so she joined Round Table Sustainable Palm-Oil – an idealist’s dream job helping to broker a marriage between industry and the environment, profitable for one, healing for the other.

But the reality, said Lee, was that policymakers, producers and environmentalists all come to the table with their own agendas, resulting in endless talkfests with little product.

“Herding cats for a parade would have been easier,” she told The Malaysian Insight in an interview recently.

The irony then hit her.

“Here I was, travelling here, there, everywhere, promoting environmentalism while generating a huge carbon footprint. Within three months of signing up for an airline card, I was bumped up to Silver status.”

Her worsening insomnia, a symptom of her increasing disillusionment with micro-change at a macro-level, and her mother’s illness, prompted Joyce to quit after nine months.

But the work hiatus turned out to be the start of the most productive years of her life. Joyce started Guerilla Gardens KL, throwing seed bombs and planting fruit trees in neglected plots of land in the middle of the night.

Then, after volunteering for soup kitchen Feeding the Needy in Chow Kit, where she realised that the homeless only got hot food, Joyce escalated to weaving together Project Tikar, where volunteers hit the streets once a fortnight with more than a dozen toiletry items for sidewalk dwellers.

That’s when Lee met Tan, then a writer. Giving a bun and a bottle of water to an old man and talking to him left Andrea sobbing all the way home and committed to the cause of the homeless.

“All my life I was told, “drug addicts dirty, stay away”, as though they were contagious,” said Tan.

“My father had just passed away. My family went through hard times. It could have been me. Why isn’t anyone looking after these people? I thought I was hardened. I was sobbing,” she said.

Joyce decided that everyone was working in silos, that they needed a base to pool scarce resources.

The seed-money for the three-year lease on premises for Pit Stop Community Cafén came from Lee and Tan’s bank accounts.

Their day at the Pit Stop starts at 8.30am, when head chef Neoh Kean Soon, trainees and volunteers come in to prepare lunch for a paying public. Lunch of rice and noodle dishes with a free drink start from RM5.50 and is available from 11.30am to 3pm.

From 2pm, prep for dinner for the homeless begins.

A regular dinner menu consists of 150 eggs, three types of bread – wheatgerm, poppy seed, melon seed – and at least four of the following: red bean, green bean, sweet potato broth, oatmeal, chicken porridge and vegetable stew/noodles for vegetarians.

Over 270 portions served until pots are dry.

One Sunday a month, Tan and Lee join Daniaal Rauff, co-founder of Feeding the Needy (FTN) and consultant chef to Pit Stop and Food Aid Foundation (FAF) to Selayang wholesale market with a crowd-sourced RM1,000 to buy “rescued” food, or edible foods that would otherwise go to waste.

Their last haul of 835kg of raw food cost RM588.

The Pit Stop Culinary Programme is more than just a place to feed the body. The programme also offers Maths classes where students, ages 16 to 25, from underprivileged backgrounds train for six months before they are placed in jobs in the food and beverage world.

They also have to attend English and Maths classes, as well as one-on-one counselling. When they are deemed proficient, they attend Basics of Business classes.

Once the cooking for the day is done, and the kitchen is cleaned, cartons of mineral water and milk are carted to Daniaal’s car and driven off to Jalan Chow Kit, where FTN feeds 550 to 700 people every Thursday night.

Lee said that work at the Pit Stop was like walking on a treadmill.

“Some days it feels like we’re fighting a rearguard action position and I almost despair. So much more could be done.

“But if it benefits even one person, saves the life of even one person, gives a kid that one fighting chance in life that he or she needed, that’s good enough,” she said.

“And we’re fortunate to have individuals who see what we do and support us financially, in kind, with their time, with skills.

“Malaysians can be kind and generous and we see that every day. We’re not just three insane souls tilting at an implacable windmill. We have a growing army of individuals who also want to make a change. That gives us hope.” – April 24, 2017.