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COVID-19: Community in Madiun builds ‘open kitchen’ to help affected residents avoid hunger
A community unit in Madiun, East Java, has set up an open kitchen to provide food for residents affected by the COVID-19 outbreak as a way to help people stay put amid the health crisis.
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A community unit in Madiun, East Java, has set up an open kitchen to provide food for residents affected by the COVID-19 outbreak as a way to help people stay put amid the health crisis. (Shutterstock/addkm)
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community unit in Madiun, East Java, has set up an “open kitchen” so that people in the area whose incomes have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic will not need to go hungry.
Residents of community unit (RT) 37 in neighborhood unit (RW) 09 of Mojorejo, a subdistrict of Taman district in Madiun, have built a kitchen accessible to the public in the yard of a house.
The RT chief, Syamsul Hadi, 43, said the kitchen was opened two weeks ago.
Syamsul said most people in the neighborhood worked in the informal sector as street vendors, parking attendants and pedicab drivers and the like and their daily income had been devastated because of the coronavirus outbreak.
Some residents also had to temporarily shut down their small businesses to comply with the government’s physical distancing policy to curb the spread of the disease.
Syamsul and some residents launched the initiative to help their neighbors upon learning about their situation.
“I started here with three other people. We donated our money – Rp 100,000 [US$6.35] each – so that we could collect at least Rp 400,000 to start,” Syamsul said on Thursday last week while he was cooking with the other residents in the kitchen.
With the money, they bought food supplies to start operating the kitchen.
In the beginning, the open kitchen could provide around 90 food packages in the morning and another 90 packages in the evening. After running for a couple of days, the initiative caught the attention of other residents who also donated food supplies, cooked food, cash and human resources.
The open kitchen can now produce 220 packages of food per day, of which 110 are distributed in the morning and 110 in the evening. In order to produce 110 packages, Syamsul said, the kitchen needed around Rp 500,000 per production.
The open kitchen distributes the meals directly to each house to avoid crowds.
Syamsul said he hoped such an initiative could help people whose livelihoods were disrupted by the pandemic.
“Many people have raised their concerns [about the pandemic]. We just want to play our small part in helping those in need,” he said as quoted by kompas.com.
As of Monday afternoon, East Java had recorded 440 confirmed COVID-19 cases, making the province -- which has recorded 30 fatalities so far -- the third-hardest hit nationwide, after Jakarta and West Java, respectively.
Indonesia recorded at least 4,557 positive cases and 399 deaths linked to the disease, according to the government's official count on Monday. (asp)
