Geneva’s poor line up for food
GENEVA: In one of the world’s most expensive cities, thousands of people lined up on Saturday for free food, as the Covid-19 crisis casts a spotlight on Geneva’s usually invisible poor.
In the Swiss city famous for its private banks, luxury watchmakers and fancy boutiques, people began lining up at 5am local time on Saturday, according to the association Caravane de Solidarite, the organiser of the event.
By the time the distribution at Geneva’s Vernets hockey stadium began four hours later, the queue of people, most wearing masks and standing two metres apart, stretched for about 1.5 kilometres.
Organisers said they believed at least as many people had showed up as a week earlier when over 2,000 took part.
“We’re in a bit of a crescendo,” Silvana Mastromatteo, head of Caravane de Solidarite, said, adding that Saturday’s distribution was the sixth the organisation had set up since the crisis began, with more and more people showing up each time.
“We need food,” Silvia Mango, a 64-year-old from the Philippines, said after waiting for three hours under a hot spring sun.
“Everything is just so much more difficult since the crisis began,” she said, adjusting the scarf draped over her mouth and nose, and acknowledged this is her second time accepting a hand-out.
Switzerland introduced a range of emergency measures in mid-March, including closing restaurants and most other businesses, to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, which to date has killed more than 1,500 people out of more than 30,000 infected in the Alpine nation.
While the country has begun gradually lifting measures, the nearly twomonth shutdown has had particularly dire consequences for undocumented workers and other vulnerable groups already living on the edge.
According to Switzerland’s Federal Statistics Office, around 8% of the population, or 660,000 are considered to live in poverty out of around one million living in a precarious situation.
“We know this population exists,” said Isabelle Widmer, who is in charge of coordinating the City of Geneva’s response to the crisis and who on Saturday was providing support to the food drive.
“But it has been astonishing to see how this population was so immediately fragilised by this crisis,” she said, as volunteers donning fluorescent yellow and orange vests stacked bags of food behind tables topped with bottles of disinfectant.
Around 1,500 large shopping bags filled with rice, pasta instant coffee, cereal and other goods have been prepared and line the walls of the large entrance hall and fill a nearby hall.