The Widow's mite

One of the local, but British, animal charities was collecting food and clothing for the refugees parked on Lesbos. So we popped along with our donation. The same day we went to a Mercadona supermarket in Monóvar where they were also collecting food for the same people. I handed over a few cans of meat and fruit.

There's another animal charity in Pinoso. They operate a café to raise money for their work. For a variety of reasons they are in financial difficulties which are principally Covid related. Maggie gave them some cash and we handed over a few things for their second-hand shop.

My support for that particular animal charity is somewhat coloured by a training event I went to in the 1990s about funding for charities. A photography project volunteered to be the guinea pigs. The trainer asked what their "mission" was; they were clear and succinct. "To promote good quality photography to the people of Cambridge". We were asked, by the trainer, to suggest ways to achieve that goal. We came up with things like pasting photographs on the side of buses, having people with sandwich boards bearing photos in the streets, publishing photos in the local paper, preparing exhibitions for schools and shops etc. The trainer asked the charity how they were promoting photography. They said they ran a gallery. The trainer suggested that maybe a lot of their effort was going towards paying the rent, heat, light and maintenance of a gallery to hang their photos for only a few hundred, already motivated, visitors rather than on doing what they'd set out to do. I am reminded of that every time I think about the efforts to run a café and good as new shop, which has all sorts of benefits for lots of people, but which only supports the animals by a rather serpentine route.

A few days ago I was watching the TV news. I saw the Open Arms boat operating off the Libyan coast and that reminded me it was a while since I'd given them anything. The bit of video that was shown over and over was of a refugee boat sinking, of a woman hauled into one of the rubber rescue boats hollering that she had lost her baby. The toddler was recovered from the Med but died soon after. 

I'm almost certain that the boat has been banned from actively looking for refugees; the best they can do is wait on one of the known routes and rescue people in trouble. It should be a thing of pride to Spaniards that Open Arms is a Spanish NGO. Economically and legally Open Arms is hanging on by the skin of its teeth. Other boats were operating in the Med, including the one funded by Banksy, but I think the ever so caring Italian Government has put so many legal obstacles in their way that the Open Arms is the only boat still currently at sea. I'd be very pleased if someone were to tell me that's duff information and there are tens of boats out there doing the decent thing whilst our governments look the other way.

The supermarkets have all joined in an initiative for the next week or so to raise money for the food banks. Covid means that collecting food is a bit dodgy so, at the checkout, you're asked if you want to be "solid" and donate. I've not seen anyone say no yet.

My charitable monthly direct debit is for the omnipresent Red Cross. This time of year they always phone trying to sell me lottery tickets but this year the approach was different. They said that Covid was pushing them to the limits. They wanted me to take 100€ worth of tickets and sell them amongst my friends. I said no but I bought more tickets than usual.

Another Christmas time appeal is Un juguete, una ilusión - A toy, a hope. They sell a biro each year with the funds raised going to providing toys for kids who don't have any. They only mentioned Covid in passing.

These groups want my money for the good things they do. There are thousands more and the virus isn't helping. 

The other day I got an email from my bank. They pointed me to a message they'd sent me via their bank app which I never read. I nearly didn't read the email as I presumed it was, yet another, advert. They told me that they were changing my current bank account and updating my terms and conditions. Although the first message was dated 6 November the changes were from the beginning of November. This is a translation: "At Santander, in recent months we have been closer than ever to our clients, helping them overcome their difficulties. Now our commitment is to reward your loyalty. We are going to transform the way we relate to you. This new, simpler and more personalised model is called Santander One". 

I have been paying 36€ per year. With the new, simpler, personalised model the cost for the same service will be 120€ per year. 

An article in PC Bolsa, dated 27 October 2020, says that Santander's profits are 48% lower than last year. No wonder they want extra money from me! Projections for Santander's profit for this virus lashed year are now just 1,109,000,000€. Poor things, how will they struggle by?

And, unlike those refugees and cats and dogs and people queuing for food and children without toys the banks know that the state, which gets a lot of its money from people like me, will look after them - they have experience. The Spanish Audit court said, in December 2015, that the cost of restructuring Spain's bankrupt savings banks after the 2008 crisis had totalled €60.7 billion, of which nearly €41.8 billion was put up by the state. I can never remember which convention Spain uses for billion - so that may be  41,800,000,000,000€ or only 41,800,000,000€.

Cold calling

I usually don't hear my mobile phone ring. So, if you phone the chances are I will miss the call. If I do hear it ring the phone is often in the depths of my bag or I'm using it to play music or I'm wearing gardening gloves. By the time I find the phone, disconnect the earphones or get my hands free the other person is long gone and I am left shouting, uselessly, into dead air. Sometimes I just decide not to answer. If it's a number I don't know or one with the identity withheld then I tend to let them be. The chances are that it will be somebody trying to sell me something or someone who has dialled the wrong number.

I don't get a lot of calls anyway. This morning, unusually, I got two, I heard them both and I answered them too. The wrong number was absolutely certain that I should be his brother even if I wasn't. My insistence that I was called Chris and this was my number seemed to cut no ice with him. No, this is my brother's number, coño, he said.

The other call was from the Red Cross. Now my method, if I do answer either the landline or my mobile to an unknown number, is to be like that Dom Joly chap shouting down the phone and trying to sound as English as possible. This scares many more than half of the cold callers away. Why bother trying to sell something to someone who won't understand when you have a call list of five hundred numbers to go? For the few who persevere a bit of "what?, eh?" does the trick. Spaniards make exactly the same complaints about cold callers and call centre workers as Brits do - the callers have undecipherable accents, the calls come when you're eating or in the shower - so I'm sure that the callers are used to having the phone slammed down on them. Somebody sounding like a half wit must be light relief for them.

Anyway the Red Cross is an acceptable call. I have a lot of time for the Spanish Red Cross. Maggie has been giving them a monthly donation for a while now and I'd decided that the next time they called I would say yes. And I did. The woman on the phone was very pleasant. She understood when I spelled my email address which is often a phone nightmare and I was in a quiet bar and even had my bank details to hand so that, all in all, it was a good call. She did ask me though if I were German.

Now that one's out of the way though I have even less reason to pick up.

Food collection

One of those Christmassy things I do is to buy whatever it is that the "A toy, a dream" - Un juguete una ilusión campaign is selling. For years now it's been a biro but when we first got here I remember it was a spinning top. The idea is you pay over the odds for the thing and the extra money gets turned into toys. In the first place those toys were shipped to poor children in South America and Africa - you know the sort of countries, the ones with names you just about recognise but you'd be hard pressed to point at on a blank map. Places like Guinea Bissau, Malawi, Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic or Guatemala. Last year, for the first time, toys were also handed out, via the Red Cross, to children in Spain.

The headline is that one of every five people living in Spain lives in the shadow of poverty - in poverty or at risk of poverty. Now I have no idea how somebody has decided what poverty is. Is it getting fewer than so many calories to eat or not having a Play Station? I'm even less convinced about the "at risk" label. I always wondered if people at risk of offending included me. After all it's almost certain that when I take my car out I'll break one or more traffic rules, I will offend, even if only briefly. I'm not, though, a harbinger of the ultimate breakdown of the established order.

Whatever the definition is, however sociologists and politicians argue it and whatever your average bigot says I do know that I see a lot of people digging about with sticks in the rubbish containers in the streets, I know I see people with cart loads of waste cardboard on trailers on the back of their bikes to weigh in and I do know that the stories of ordinary people losing their homes and going hungry are everywhere.

There was an article on the news about the food banks. They collect food from individuals, from producers, from retailers, from supporters of every shape, size and hue. The food is channeled through NGOs to people who need it through food parcels, community canteens and the like.

Maggie noticed the news item. To me it was old news. I gave a lot of rice, pasta, oil and canned stuff away last year - even my pal Carlos tried collecting food in the place he worked. So it was like buying the pen for the toys. Normal. I thought about it though. Maggie was away in Qatar last Christmas so to her it was a new phenomenon in Spain. This is not collecting food principally for homeless people or those living in shelters but for the ordinary working man and woman. Your everyday Joe fallen on hard times with no job, with an inflated mortgage from the building boom, whose dole payments have run out, where the family members who were providing informal support now find themselves hard pressed too after losing their own jobs or with the parental savings exhausted.

So we were in the Mercadona supermarket. There were people there wearing waistcoats to identify them as volunteers collecting food. They were sorting the food into big containers - oil in this one, canned goods here etc. The containers were on palettes. An industrial scale operation. They had plastic bags to hand out for shoppers to collect the stuff in. Our bag was ripped and as Maggie paid the bill I cradled it over to the collectors. Maggie was cross with me. She'd paid but I had handed the goods over.

It would be better if people weren't poor. It would be better if the state looked after its people but in the meantime volunteers in supermarkets it is.