This trifecta of emergencies has severely debilitated Greece. Leap-frogging from one dire situation to another, longtime volunteer Dhimitris Nora says “the only difference is the people you are feeding.”
This year’s coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout presented the organization with yet another major crisis. In 2015, the kitchen turned its attention to another urgent case: feeding an influx of homeless asylum seekers in the city center. In that vacuum, Konstantinos Polychronopoulos, the soup kitchen’s founder, aimed to build community and trust by cooking alongside people in need-many of whom were aging retirees. As a condition of European Union and International Monetary Fund bailouts, austerity measures were put in place, leaving many of Greece’s residents poor or unemployed, with little in the way of a public safety net. It’s a responsibility that O Allos Anthropos has honed since it opened in 2011, in response to the widespread increases in food insecurity and homelessness that followed the 2010 Greek debt crisis. The scene was typical for Athens: a quickly mobilized, person-to-person effort responding to an emergency. The food would be packed in aluminum containers and handed out to hungry people in Kerameikos, where trendy cafes abut dilapidated buildings. Others cooked tortellini over a gas burner on the sidewalk. One group of volunteers, donning face masks and gloves, sorted clothing donations bound for Evia and Karditsa, two regions of Greece hit hard by extreme late-summer floods. So many people showed up that there wasn’t enough for everyone to do. The organization had posted an open invitation on Instagram for help. October 11 was a busy day at O Allos Anthropos (“The Other Person”), a community soup kitchen in the Kerameikos neighborhood of Athens, Greece.
0 kommentar(er)
