On Local Matters this week we talk about in-work-poverty. More than 13 percent of the population lives below the poverty line despite working. This percentage is among the highest in Europe. Yesterday, we had Carole Reckinger on the microphone, head of political campaigning for Caritas Luxembourg. She told us why people who work need to shop for groceries in Caritas’s épicerie sociale. Today, we have a visit at the Vollekskichen in Bonnevoie, a restaurant led by the Asbl CNDS, the national social defense committee. Vollekskichen in Luxembourgish means the people’s kitchen. Rita Lavina is responsible for the restaurant and a social worker.
Once the first bunch of people is served, Rita Lavina makes a tour of the tables chatting with her customers. In the past year, more and more people come to the Vollekskichen. The teams prepares between 80 and 100 meals per day. Before the series of multiple crisis kicked off with covid, usually it was around 50. It’s Rita Lavina’s task to keep the restaurant going, to take care of the costumers and the employees. The employees at Vollekskichen are long-term jobseekers who touch the social inclusion income Revis and have exhausted all options on the regular job market. Some of them have lost their job when their company closed down and never got back on track. Others, for different reasons, have never worked in their life.
Rita Lavina is all over the place. At 11.20, she opens the doors, a few people are already waiting in the hall. She knows them all, says hi, and gets behind the cash desk.
One man orders a meal for himself and one to takeaway for Ali, his neighbor who cannot leave the house for health reasons. A younger man who joins the line works around the corner. He comes here for lunch because “the food is good and it’s cheap”. Another one says: “I live alone, that’s why I come here to eat. I am 80 years old and alone is alone. Here I hear what’s going on and I have conversations.” Mostly elderly men come here to eat. Their wives died and they had never learned how to prepare a hot meal. People who don’t know each other sit together and start chatting during lunch. It might happen that a worker in a suit sits next to a person of whom Rita Lavina would say: “He doesn’t smell like roses.”
Rita Lavina is the good soul of Vollekskichen. During the pandemic, she printed numerous vaccination certificates, arranged appointments for vaccination and explained her customers the rules and procedures. She helps people searching for a flat, sends them to the right addresses for social assistance, provides information. Rita Lavina has been leading the Vollekskichen since the very beginning. In the beginning of the 1990s, she and the CNDS set up a field kitchen in the city, handing out soup to the people on the street. In 1993, they got this building in Bonnevoie, between Banannefabrik and the round-about Dernier Sol. For nearly 30 years, Rita Lavina and the Vollekskichen have prepared meals for those in need.