„June always starts with the International Children’s Day. This year, the day was particularly sensitive for the community of Maisto Bankas as, for several months now, mothers fleeing the war in Ukraine and their young children have been flooding into our offices and warehouses every day. It is still difficult to convince people who fled the war zone just a day or two ago that they can feel safe in Lithuania and it is hard to elicit a smile on the faces of children who flinch from the slightest sound.
But our volunteers have noticed that when children are offered sweets, their faces brighten up immediately and mothers are delighted to see their children smiling for the first time in months. So we have known for a long time that, after providing families with initial assistance in the form of basic food and grocery cards, we would look for ways to help Ukrainian children take some distance from the war.
We are happy that the Taiwanese Representative Office in Lithuania and the people of Taiwan believed in our idea and donated funds for this project, thanks to which we bought a lot of sweets that we will distribute to the Ukrainian children all over Lithuania,“ says Simonas Gurevičius, the director of Maisto Bankas.
Throughout the month of June, the Maisto Bankas’ buses, which have been transporting food that has been saved from being thrown away, are being transformed into Smaližiamobiliai [sweet tooth cars]. According to the head of the organisation, this project was supported not only by the Taiwanese who donated funds but also by a large number of volunteers of different nationalities in Lithuania, teams from various companies, and Ukrainians themselves.
„As soon as we announced the project, we received a large number of volunteers. Dozens of people in Lithuania volunteered to help sort the food, pack more than 20,000 sweet parcels, and prepare them for the journey. Our warehouses were packed with regular Food Bank volunteers, as well as people visiting Lithuania from Scandinavia, France, Belarus, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
The teams of businesses whose workplaces give free days for volunteering, as well as schoolchildren from different schools in Lithuania, were also eager to join in. And when we were looking for a suitable name for the project in Ukrainian, we also enlisted the help of Ukrainian children and their families, who keep coming to Maisto Bankas. They suggested and wrote on paper the most beautiful names in Ukrainian. This is how not only the Lithuanian ‘Smaližiamobilis’ was born, but also the Ukrainian and slightly English-sounding’ ЛасунCar’,“ says S. Gurevičius.
The Smaližiamobilis – ЛасунCar will symbolically start its journey in the capital, at the White Bridge, where this Saturday, from 12 to 17 o’clock, little Ukrainians will be waiting for the initiative at the Day of Friends organised by ukrainiankids.lt. Starting next week, the cars will move through all Lithuanian municipalities, with stops and locations available on www.maistobankas.lt/kids. The sweet packages of the Food Bank include a variety of biscuits and corn, chocolates, gummies, sweets, chewing gum, wafers and even soap bubbles. According to the organisers of the project, enough sweet packages will be prepared for every Ukrainian child, of whom, according to the Lithuanian Statistics Department, there are currently more than 21,000 in Lithuania.
Since the beginning of the war, the charity and support fund Maisto Bankas has already distributed 68,020 food parcels and 49,430 grocery store cards to Ukrainians in Lithuania (worth EUR 115 each). 653 tonnes of food and drinks have been transported to Ukraine and distributed to people living in the regions of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Lviv, Dnipro, and Odesa. In Lithuania, the organisation supports more than 160,000 people in need every month.
