Polyparty-ism - Search for Common Ground

108
I can. I carry along the package with
cans that the people from the
kitchen gave me for the New Year
holidays," says Blagoja Janevski.
He is a baker who has spent his
entire working life making bread,
and now, as he says, in order to survive
he has to beg and to come to
get food in the kitchen .
During the New Year holidays,
Gjakonija distributed packages with
food for several days to everyone
who eats in the kitchen. Packages
including clothes and footwear,
donations from citizens and firms,
are given to poor people.
"The kitchen's doors are wide
open for all well-intended people.
We opened the dining rooms of
love, as we call them, in 1998. Since
then, we prepare food for everyone
five times a week, we do not make
any distinction based on sex, age,
ethnic origin or religion . People
come who have no money, who are
homeless, old and exhausted, people
that nobody takes care of. Young
people who live on the streets come
very often, too. We also prepare
meals for people who are not able to
come on their own to have lunch in
the kitchens," says Angelina
Dzadzu, president of the
Association.
She says that Skopje needs at
least one kitchen in every bigger
settlement and one in every bigger
city. Aunt Angelina's biggest wish is
that Gjakonija gets its own premises
where food could be distributed
several times a day and to a greater
number of people.
The kitchens are now located in
the premises of the Skopje bishopric
of the Macedonian Orthodox
Church.
The Association Gjakonija, as
Aunt Angelina says, works with the
blessing and the help of Bishop
Agatangel of Bregalnica and the
archbishop of Ohrid and Macedonia
Gospodin Gospodin. Stefan and all
the donors, who have unselfishly
donated money and other resources
in order to keep the kitchen working.
In spring, the Association is
going to open a national kitchen in
Stip also, supported by the local
municipal authorities and Bishop
Agatangel.
(The author is a
journalist in Dnevnik)
Tales from the streets
of Skopje
The sky is a roof for
the people with no adress
Aleksandra M. Mitevska
Tome spends another night under a market booth in one suburb of
Skopje. And when a new day rises, too gray and cold to go outside
without a coat, this sixty-year old man, whose eyes stray far away,
goes for another walk dressed in torn clothing worn to shreds. Begging
and digging through the garbage-bins are his weapons in the battle for
existence. At first sight you will probably say that he is one of the
vagrants who are a common backdrop in the capital, begging for the
bare minimum of resources to survive another day faced with "naked"
poverty.
This time, however, the story is a little bit different.
He doesn't want to speak much, but if
Until five or six
years ago he had a someone could manage to gain his trust, he
stable marriage would recount that this is how he has always
and raised two imagined his life. The hero of this story became
kids, but suddenly a man with no address, with the street for a home
something broke and the sky for a roof for the past few years. Five
inside him and or six years ago he had a stable marriage and
made him sever raised two kids, but suddenly something broke
his ties with his inside him and made him sever ties with his family
and become a homeless man by choice, thus
family and become
leaving behind his wife, a clerk, and his two sons,
a homeless man by
both intellectuals.
choice. Abandoned Tome is just one of the many homeless men,
train cars are whose number rises from day to day, especially
home for a brother in Skopje. There are plenty of other cases of people
who live wherever they can, though they do
and sister, who
were forced to it for different reasons. At the abandoned lot
leave the orphanage
on their 18th family lives in a cardboard hut. Both the mother
under the main railway station a three-member
birthday
and the two juvenile daughters stroll and beg in a
battle for mere survival. Not that far away, abandoned
train cars are a home for Ljupcho (27) and
his younger sister. To them, the 18th birthday was not a once-in-a-lifetime
celebration when you finally step into the world of the adults, but
a step into great uncertainty. Because on that date they had no choice,
they had to leave the orphanage. These two young people, who had
never met their parents, usually have their meals at the public kitchen
and sometimes they get food and clothes from good people they meet.
But when from time to time, they happen to have nothing to eat, they
are also forced to beg.
Life on the margins, February 2003