While the COVID-19 crisis continues to take its toll, 12 Syrian refugee families in Alençon, France, joined forces to cook meals for healthcare workers. It’s one of several initiatives launched across the country to feed vulnerable groups and frontline workers risking their lives during the public health crisis.
Wearing gloves and
face masks, a group of Syrian refugees are cooking up a storm in
Alençon, a town in France’s northwestern Normandy region. On a
sunny spring day during the coronavirus pandemic, 12 Syrian
families – with a total of around 40 people – prepared and
delivered 50 delicious meals to healthcare workers at the Alençon
hospital.
"We wanted to do something to help the
healthcare workers who are risking their lives all over the country,"
Abdul Rahman Ajaj, a 39-year-old bus driver whose work has ground to
a halt due to France’s nationwide lockdown, told InfoMigrants. "We
came up with the idea of mobilizing Syrian refugee families in
Alençon because in our culture, that's how it is: when someone needs
help, we chip-in. We were able to contact 12 families. All of them
said yes."Each family prepared a Middle Eastern
specialty: Crisp, flaky samoussas, flavoured kebbeh, tabbouleh,
hummus, small pizzas – called laham bajine in Syria – and
traditional Levantine pastries. The food was delivered by some
members of the group to the hospital’s emergency room, which was
notified in advance. Ajaj said his group of volunteer cooks would
organize two more food distribution services for the hospital later
this month. “We are also thinking about other initiatives for the
fire brigade or the police," he added.
Refugee Food Festival provides 200 meals a day in Paris
A number of migrants across France are developing similar culinary solidarity programs to help vulnerable and at-risk communities deal with the unprecedented public health crisis.
At a kitchen
in Paris, refugee chefs are hard at work. For the past three weeks,
chefs working with Refugee Food Festival, a project initially
aimed at facilitating the professional integration of refugees in
France’s food sector, have been cooking around 200 meals a day for
the staff and inhabitants of a center housing asylum seekers and
homeless people in the French
capital.
"We
realized the need in terms of food aid that the crisis was going to
generate in Paris. The situation for the most vulnerable is
increasingly alarming. We realized we just had to
open our kitchen and get on with it," the project’s
co-founder, Marine Mandrila, told the Paris-based sustainable
development website "L'Info
Durable".
Installed in
the kitchens of La Résidence, a restaurant in the 12th
arrondissement of the French capital, the group also handles product
packaging and delivery.
'I too experienced this'
The food aid
is organized by teams who are all too familiar with the precarious
conditions and challenges confronting the beneficiaries. "It's
very important [to do this] because I too experienced this kind of
thing when I was an asylum seeker," Raimot Tijani, a Nigerian
cook and refugee, told the HuffingtonPost.
The Refugee Food
Festival is one of the signatories of a call by dozens of French NGOs
for "restaurateurs’ solidarity" published April 15 in the
French weekly, Le Journal du Dimanche. “In the face of the adversity,
isolation and sometimes even abandonment generated by the health
crisis, it has been four weeks since our citizens' initiatives have
shown that another model is not only possible but also sustainable,”
noted the solidarity campaign call. “Sustainable food and aid to
the most deprived must be at the heart of our society today to
guarantee different circumstances for the world tomorrow.”