Four Krishna devotees will set out from Budapest on Friday morning to join a local group of Krishna devotees in Turkey at the earthquake sites to provide hot meals to survivors in the region hardest hit by the disaster.
The food distributors will arrive in Antakya, in Hatay Province, with the support of the Turkish Disaster Management Agency, where meals will be prepared and distributed from a field kitchen set up in a truck. At a downtown location designated by the military, they will provide simple, nutritious one-dish meals to survivors and those participating in rescue efforts.
Following a natural disaster, the first step is to search for survivors and treat the injured with the help of trained personnel, while a temporary relief system is being established. Since the infrastructure in the affected region has collapsed, roads are difficult or impossible to traverse, and buildings that are still standing could collapse at any moment, providing for survivors poses a huge challenge in the long term. In such situations, it is a tremendous help when charitable organizations with their own professional equipment arrive on the scene to provide tangible assistance to the surviving population through their vital work and by providing fresh mental and physical labor. This is because the majority of survivors are unwilling or unable to leave the area, which has become life-threatening, due to relatives who are missing, injured, or trapped under the rubble.
The food distribution effort is getting underway with the support of the Turkish subsidiary of the DSV transportation and logistics company, which is assisting the initiative by providing vehicles, procuring and transporting cooking ingredients and equipment to the site, as well as providing interpreters and coordinators to support the effort. The initiative is also being supported by donations from international companies that previously supported the Food for Life Foundation’s relief effort in Ukraine.
The Hungarian team is led by Attila Szanyi-Karl, the foundation’s highly experienced president. Depending on the circumstances, they set up on site to prepare and distribute several hundred—or even several thousand—servings of hot one-dish meals each day. Of course, the foundation’s staff in Hungary continue to run the food distribution program in Hungary without interruption during this time—they continue to deliver thousands of servings of hot meals daily to Hungarians in need.
This is not the first time that Hungarian food distributors have helped provide food to disaster-stricken areas. The “Food for Life” program of the Krishna devotees was present after the tsunami in Sri Lanka, the earthquake that struck Haiti, and the landslide in Bosnia, as well as in Ukraine; in Hungary, they actively helped during the floods, the Devecser sludge spill, as well as during the refugee crisis and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Krishna devotees express their sincere condolences to the Turkish people, pray for the victims, and hope for a swift improvement in the circumstances of the survivors—a goal they intend to actively support through food distributions. Situations such as these serve as painful reminders of the transience of human life, and therefore the devotees hope that this will also help bring an end to the devastating wars currently raging.
You can support the relief effort with just a few clicks at www.karitativ.hu You can make a donation via the website, by selecting „Turkey” in the donation form, or directly through the Food for Life Foundation’s website in Turkey: https://www.yasamicinyemek.org/en