Bath foam. Wine. Canned vegetable. Soft drink. muesli. And all of this can be picked up for free and for nothing in the shopping cabinet of Marina Knipa. The initiative of the 59-year-old Veldhoven has been running for less than a week, but is already in great demand with her fellow citizens who are struggling to make ends meet financially. “I’m even called an angel.”
“I have just been offered two bags of groceries full of luxury things,” Marina beams on the phone. “There is so much poverty because of that expensive gas and all the uncertainty that comes with it, I thought I had to do something.”
Marina saw in the various Facebook groups about Veldhoven that two other women already had such a shopping cabinet in the garden and decided to become the third. In her garden, among the trees on Ceres 4, she placed her own ‘grocery takeaway’. “Very discreet. No one can see it from the street when you come to get things. I don’t see it and I don’t need to. ”
“I just hope that more people will follow my example.”
The donors of the groceries, other Veldhoven residents who can afford it, can put the items in the cupboard themselves. “I can imagine that they don’t want to be in the publicity either,” says Marina.
“It runs like clockwork and it’s really fun, because that’s how poor people get their stuff. The reactions are heartwarming. A woman even called me an angel over the internet. And yet I have only provided a closet that is filled by the population,” she says modestly. “I just hope that more people will follow my example and this will become something new in the Netherlands.”