Gavin Kibble MBE reflects on his trip to visit a programme supported by Feed The Hungry in Sofia.
Perhaps naively, I am still shocked when I meet communities living in absolute poverty – especially in a modern European state such as Bulgaria. On a bitterly cold Saturday in February, with the thermometer barely above freezing, I met Mila (not her real name), one of the many children living in Fakulteta, a district of Sofia home to an estimated 50,000 Roma people.
Mila was waiting patiently for the clothes and hot food that the Full Gospel Church brings to the district every two months. In a pink T-shirt, jeans with more holes than denim, and sliders on her feet, she was using all of her effort to stop herself shivering uncontrollably. Within ten minutes she had a warm jumper and a brand new quilted winter coat, both provided by GAIN – Global Aid International, who are co-located with Feed The Hungry at our warehouse in Coventry.
“She has no idea how much that coat is worth,” Frikkie Greyling, CEO of GAIN UK, told me. Whether she did or not, it wasn’t what interested her. Volunteers were handing out toys, and a small teddy bear had caught her eye, but she was too far away to reach it. I passed it to her myself. The smile that swept across her face is the kind you treasure for life.
“It’s not unusual for children to turn up in just rags,” Pastor Filip Rashiv told me, as the children’s attention turned to a huge cauldron of soup, stirred by a formidable woman who ladled in herbs, beans and the sausage that features in so much of the Eastern European diet. Bowls, pans, anything the children could get their hands on, were filled and carried carefully home.
Fakulteta is a settlement of largely illegally built housing in Sofia. Illiteracy and unemployment are endemic, driving deep and persistent poverty. The streets are mostly unpaved, electricity and water are poorly maintained and limited, and the municipal park at its heart has become a dumping ground whose foul smell hangs over the whole district. Many residents scrape a living scavenging what they can from it.
The Full Gospel Church, pastored by Filip Rashiv and his wife Rossi, has grown rapidly through this kind of hands-on community work. Filip’s friendship with our Global Partnership Manager, Ian Siddall, and relationship with GAIN, which already supplies goods to the church, gave Feed The Hungry the opportunity to partner with Filip’s church to support the meals programme in Fakulteta.
The church’s reach extends beyond Fakulteta. Every week, after a Sunday service held in Ukrainian, it supplies 100 Ukrainian families with basic foodstuffs – sugar, salt, tomatoes, peas, biscuits. These are mostly mothers and children; many have been in Bulgaria since the war began, without any support from the state.
This kind of quiet, consistent work with Jesus at the centre of all they do – one coat, one bowl of soup, one family at a time.
