Messiah for Covid jobless

A couple has been giving away hot meals to people left unemployed due to the pandemic

Budapest: Hungarian families stricken by unemployment due to the Covid crisis who have also fallen through the country’s flimsy social security net say they have little option, but to turn to a pop-up soup kitchen. The help is a private initiative by Norbert Bango and his wife Vivien, who run a Budapest restaurant and decided to re-purpose its kitchen as a relief centre after it was shuttered last March during the first coronavirus lockdown.

Since then, at least once a week, the couple have been preparing and distributing hot meals as well as bags of essentials like cooking oil, flour and fruit. “We’re the only restaurant in central Budapest doing this. We gave up our Christmas break with our family as we couldn’t sleep knowing people would go hungry,” said Vivien, while ladling stew from a steaming vat into hundreds of plastic bowls of noodles. Located in Budapest’s nightlife district, the “Kis Kulacs” (“Little Flask”) hosted popular live music sessions after the couple bought it two years ago.

But since the coronavirus measures emptied the city of tourists and customers, it now plays host to a queue of people desperate for food, regularly stretching for hundreds of metres. “When we started, so many families with children came that I said whatever happens I have to keep going to try to help them,” Norbert, 48, said. Many in the queue said they had lost their jobs due to the pandemic.

“I’m one of 50 let go this year from my former workplace,” Cecilia Jakab, a 37-year-old office cleaner and single mother of three said.”We can’t pay our bills anymore, but since Norbi and Vivi started this at least my children can be fed,” she said.

The virus caused a recession, which is estimated to have shrunk the economy by over six percent last year, and the loss of several hundred thousand jobs during the first lockdown in springtime. “We don’t get any kind of social aid now, so many people end up here,” said Andras Mezo, 47, a restaurant cook, jobless since March, who has been regularly joining the meals queue.”