It's hard to write about a volunteering experience without hitting all the usual problematic tropes. It's also hard to write about a volunteering experience mentioning how hard it is to write an update without all the usual problematic tropes.

So instead this post will focus on the stalwarts of Saffron Kitchen Project in Athens, a small charity feeding hundreds of vulnerable people every day - Athens natives, asylum seekers and refugees alike. Even spending just two weeks surrounded by these people makes clear the contradictions of complexities of trying to tackle a systemic issue - hunger and food poverty - that is so immediate and obvious on an individual level yet so incomprehensible and seemingly insurmountable when viewed in its entirety.

Despite the huge quantities cooked every day at SKP, it's an oasis of calm most days. Sharing a building with two other charities, the process of cooking and packing meals is second nature to chefs Adel and Mamadou. The volunteers who arrive and help out - whether a half-day or six weeks - quickly pick up the rhythm too.

The concept that underlies SKP, as founder Evelina describes, is reinventing the soup kitchen. No more mushy lentils or stringy soup - everything cooked by SKP is nutritious and packed with flavour and love - and yet those who work and volunteer at SKP and spread this love around the city hardly get to see the results. All meals cooked by SKP are picked up by frontline organisations that then hand them out to the vulnerable, so it's rare for the cooks to have any contact with the people who enjoy them.

This routine takes place every day, and the constant need for daily meals should seem demoralising. Cooking 100, then 200, then 300 meals every day may seem like a personal achievement, but what that increasing demand indicates - that people in a city like Athens are going hungry - is anything but good news.

And yet everyone is happy to plug away and help where they can. Volunteers come from all over the world to help here - New York City, the Seychelles, Portugal, France.

This is the strange space in which charities like SKP operate - pride in tackling a problem that becomes overwhelming the more you think about it.

Is it productive to philosophise about this? It can lead you down a rabbit hole of paralysis and self-pity - and then what help are you to anyone?

Yes, it's true that many problems are global and systemic in scale, difficult to tackle without coordinated action. But what's left to individuals is tackling the immediate evils that we can ameliorate best.