Meet the Filipino offering 200 free meals a day to Dubai’s jobless migrants during the coronavirus shutdown
Hong Kong: Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Carrie Lam on Thursday signed the National Anthem Ordinance passed by the Legislative Council (LegCo) in accordance with Article 48(3) of the Basic Law of the HKSAR.
The National Anthem Ordinance will come into immediate effect after it is published in the Gazette yesterday.
“I am pleased that the National Anthem Ordinance will be gazetted and come into effect tomorrow, signifying the fulfilment of the constitutional responsibility of the HKSAR and reflecting the spirit of ‘one country, two systems’,” Ms Lam said.
Dubai: Feby Dela Peña saw her fellow Filipinos standing in line outside her building in Dubai, waiting for free food. And she was stricken – what if her family, too, had lost their income amid the COVID-19 outbreak? How would she have fed her three children?
“We’re poor, to be honest,” said Ms Dela Peña, who is also unemployed.
“But it’s not a reason for me not to help, you know?”
So the next day, she withdrew the money that was supposed to feed her family of five for a month. When their 11 housemates got wind of her plan – like most migrant workers in Dubai, the family lives in a shared flat – those who could chipped in as well.
She was able to buy about 500 dirhams’ (US$136) worth of groceries, including 30 frozen chickens and sacks of rice. And she began to cook.
That is how Ms Dela Peña, 34, launched the project she calls Ayuda – it means help. Each day, she offers 200 free meals to the hungry of Dubai, all of them foreigners, like her own family.
Migrants account for 90 per cent of the workforce in the United Arab Emirates. The economic shutdown that came with COVID-19 hit their communities hard. Despite promises by the Philippine government to help overseas workers with a one-time cash assistance, and despite a nationwide “10 million meals” initiative by the government of the United Arab Emirates to feed the poor, many are struggling to secure their next meal.
“Life is so hard and they don’t have anyone to depend on,” Ms Dela Peña said.
She is a confident cook who used to sell home-made meals to friends as a way to earn extra money. She said she also has a licence in food safety.
But cooking 200 meals a day is a massive undertaking, especially with a six-year-old, a toddler and a baby at home.
The finances are dicey; Ms Dela Peña relies on her husband’s modest income from a sales job. But when word of her efforts spread on social media, people began dropping off cartons of eggs and bags of rice.
An influential
Emirati blogger gave her 10,000 dirhams. She leans on her housemates, husband and her brother-in-law, who was let go from his job in a tea shop during the pandemic, to help with buying the groceries, thawing the meats, chopping the food and cooking. Ultimately, though, she’s in charge.
“It’s a big thing if you can help like 10 people not to sleep hungry,” she said, as she scooped up cooked rice, fried fish and boiled eggs into containers to distribute.
AP