Tafel Kirchheim May 2017
Tafel Kirchheim is an organization under the Red Cross in Germany. It is a grocery shop for low income people and families. Aniela Zajac has been running this grocery shop for 17 years. The shop is open three days a week and everyone is welcome to shop there if you first show a card from social services. She manages the shop with help from 20 volunteers who take turns helping at the shop. The only time they receive any pay is for their gas when they go to collect food.
There are 120 families who shop here. They pay 1/3 of the price for food items they would pay in a grocery store. On average shoppers spend 5-20 €, which gives them many bags full of food. All of the food here comes from donations from other grocery stores, people, or markets who bring leftover items, or foods they could not sell. Other donations come from boy scouts who collect food from many generous people. The money that the people pay for the food items here all goes back to the Red Cross to help others.
Partex Germany’s Managing Director Andreas Blankenhorn and Partex employee Ellen Schmidt joined us to do support the work at the shop and bring all the items that we had brought to donate to Tafel Kirchheim. We bought 500 € worth of food which was the biggest donation they had ever received.
That included:
– 50 kg sugar
– 50 kg flour
– 50 kg rice
– 50 kg coffee
– 86 kg pasta
– 60 L cooking oil
– 24 L noodle soup
– 24 big jars of preserves sausage
– 24 tin cans of tomato soup
– 20 jars of strawberry marmalade
Aniela cried tears of joy when she saw all of the items we brought. At 10:00 we opened the doors for people to shop. Sophie sold pieces of breads for 5 cents/each. She met several families and people who shop there. Many of them bought food from 4-20 €, which provided a large amount of food for them for a low cost. We were very impressed by the hard and dedication of Aniela and her volunteer staff. Without them and their great work, any of these people would struggle to put food on the table for their families.
Blog posts - Tafel Kirchheim
