Helping families in need

Whole society is kind of paralysed. Restaurants, small shops, hairdressers, physical therapies, spas, pools... if it's not neccessary, it's closed. And that means people are loosing their salaries.

Municipalities have trying to help people. First they told that schoolchildren will get their "food rations" (children get free lunch at schools) once a week: not ready made meals, but ingredients to make five meals per week. And this week they begun to hand out bags of food to families/people, who are suffering loss of income.

I was asked if we want food for our school children (we have three kids at school, all of them get free lunch every day when in school) but I declined. I think there are families in much more dire need at the moment - we on the other hand are lucky ones, hb is working in food industry, and even if their products are not considered most basic food products, production is still on.
And I - well on monday I'll start working on a new project in which we try to find ways to handle things when all this begin to return to normal.

I saw what one local munincipality is handing out to people. Depending on size of family, portions vary, but there was just essentials. What was striking to me was lack of ready meals, tins and highly processed products. There were:
-ground beef and ground pork
-chicken fillets
-eggs
-oats
-cheese
-sandwich ham
-spread
-rice
-potatoes (which were not pre washed, so they were still having dirt - they way most potatoes are sold here)
-bananas
-apples
-cucumbers
-tomatoes
-rye bread (essential here, made of full corn and only few% of wheat)
-crispy rye bread
-milk (non-fat lactose free)
-berry soup
-plain yoghurt
-coffee
-toilet paper

I think they was suprisingly well thought  items - you have to remember they have had only few days to plan and act.

Food banks are in trouble, because most volunteers are over 70 or otherwise in high risk. Therefore they are not handing out food at their food banks, they are now delivering parcels directly to people. Food banks here don't need food now, they need volunteers from non risk groups and money. Many restaurants have donated their stock to food banks, otherwise it would have been wasted.

But if you are not in financial crisis, you can buy help: taxis are doing peoples food shopping and delivering medicines, animal shelters are helping people to take their pets to vet, garages are picking cars from home, fixing them and returning them and sanitizing them before handing them back.

Right now I think people have realized this is the real thing. Most people try to be in that part of society that helps stop this epidemic.