Meet the Filipino offering 200 free meals a day to Dubai’s jobless migrants during coronavirus shutdown
- Feby Dela Peña started with US$136 worth of groceries, including 30 frozen chickens and sacks of rice. And then she began to cook
- Migrants account for 90 per cent of the workforce in the United Arab Emirates. The economic shutdown hit their communities hard
Feby Dela Peña saw her fellow Filipinos standing in line outside her building in Dubai, waiting for free food. And she was stricken – what if her family, too, had lost their income amid the Covid-19 outbreak? How would she have fed her three children?
“We’re poor, to be honest,” said Dela Peña, who is also unemployed. “But it’s not a reason for me not to help, you know?”
So the next day, she withdrew the money that was supposed to feed her family of five for a month.
When their 11 housemates got wind of her plan – like most migrant workers in Dubai, the family lives in a shared flat – those who could chipped in as well. She was able to buy about 500 dirhams’ (US$136) worth of groceries, including 30 frozen chickens and sacks of rice. And she began to cook.
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Unemployed Filipina offers free food to those in need in Dubai
That is how Dela Peña, 34, launched the project she calls Ayuda – it means help. Each day, she offers 200 free meals to the hungry of Dubai, all of them foreigners, like her own family.