Kill The Poor I've been a soup van volunteer for three months plus a couple of weeks. I've also been casually mentioning this example of my beneficence in everyday conversation for about the same length of time. I use this particular phrasing, rather than "I work on a soup van", because what I'm trying to emphasise is that I didn't take it up lightly or gingerly. In the beginning, I didn't know exactly how it would turn out, but I did know that I wanted to be good. Between then and now, an awful lot became clear.