What works in Germany ought to work in Greece: a Greek restaurateur based in Bremerhaven plans to bring German-style food banks to his home country.
Bremerhaven/Athens (dpa) - Greek restaurant owner Alexis Vaiou came to Germany when he was 10 years old. But he has never forgotten his country of birth, and now hopes to help the poor in Athens with German-style food banks.
Together with Manfred Jabs, the director of the food bank in the north German city of Bremerhaven, he's hoping to launch a similar project in three deprived areas of the Greek capital.
The consulate general in Hamburg and three local mayors in Athens have already promised their support, according to the newspaper Nordsee-Zeitung.
"I want this system because I like it," says Vaiou, referring to the food banks.
The project is due to get under way in the autumn, with a bus and two refrigerated lorries. Vaiou, now 38, is hoping that Greeks will support the initiative and that it might eventually be folded out across the entire country.
The friendship between Germany and Greece is very important to him - and that's what he told German Chancellor Angela Merkel when he saw her during an election campaign earlier this year, though she wasn't able to accept his invitation to his restaurant.
Jabs has been working closely with Vaiou. They're hoping to get support from the supermarkets Lidl and Metro, both of which operate in Greece.
The pair are to fly to Athens in the coming weeks for talks about setting up the food banks and want to get much of the preparatory work done then.
That includes advertising for volunteers, looking for suitable premises, finding delivery vehicles and convincing supermarkets to donate their leftover food.
It's important to work with already existing support systems such as soup kitchens, adds Jabs.
Since the financial crisis began in 2009, more and more Greeks have been forced to rely on food donations. Hundreds of thousands of people get food tokens from the state or use church-run soup kitchens.
Former saleswoman Elena M, 67, gets pasta, milk and olive oil every other day from a church in Athens.
"If I didn't have that, I'd have to beg at the traffic lights," she says.
People are also trying to help their neighbours more. "We tend to cook a bit extra and give a couple of portions to the old people on the first floor," says Dimitris Sarris, a shoe retailer in the Kypseli district of the Greek capital.
In many supermarkets, customers can buy non-perishable products and leave them for the needy - the baskets for the donations are nearly always full.
Radio stations and medical organisations also organise drugs collections - medicines that are not yet out of date are collected and given to patients who don't have any health insurance.
Food banks have been a fixture of Germany's welfare system for years. In Bremerhaven around 1,100 people are entitled to use them. If you include their family members, that means around 3,300 people profit from the donated food.
Jabs says the biggest problem is always finding enough volunteers to help out.
In Germany there are 926 food banks with around 3,000 distribution centres. "They all have a lot to do," says Jabs.
Next week representatives of the food banks are holding a nation-wide meeting in the Bavarian city of Augsburg - the Greek initiative could well end up on the agenda.
Comments
Comments are closed.