Pedro Matos. “If each parish could welcome 10 families, Portugal could receive 100,000 refugees”
Pedro Matos has been working for the United Nations World Food Program for 13 years, the UN agency awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. He is one of the Portuguese (in 2020 there were 11) in the team distributed across 80 countries, which daily guarantees the delivery of food to nearly 100 million people, most of them children. It has its base in Sudan, where it waved in 2009, but it has already been called to several refugee and internally displaced persons crises: the Rohingya flight in 2018, the human tragedy by Cyclone Idai in Beira in 2019 or the conflict in the Sahel, not Mali. He has now been designated as one of the World Food Program’s emergency coordinators in the war in Ukraine. On the phone with oi from Budapest, where he is based, he explains the intervention that he is planning to last months and cover millions of people and talks about the three three in creating a sustained response rather than building a “parallel system” from scratch. And the international solidarity that is still needed, the “accounts” on the reception of others that the countries can make of others that the refugees who receive the donations for Ukraine uncover, even more, the misery of the other corners of the planet.
What atmosphere have you had around you in Budapest?
Here in Hungary there is a strange normality for a country that has already received 280,000 refugees. There are still a lot of tourists, but the presence of refugees is already noticeable, with many Ukrainian and Ukrainian registrations on the streets. The hotels are full because the government has been reserving them to put people in. For example, the hotel where we have been working has around 80 families in 160 rooms. The richest countries have plenty of accommodation capacity for two individuals who live from people to the imagination, which has hosted more than millions. Apartments are located in several buildings transformed into temporary accommodation.
The information in Hungary, the information that has been conveyed is that children are not receiving face-to-face classes for schools that can access dimensions.
Yes, the Government activated the tele-school covid-19 regime in order to free schools.
He has worked for more than ten years at the United Nations World Food Program and has been in very different scenarios. Have you ever seen anything on this scale?
Do not. I think that since the Second World War there have been no flows of refugees of this magnitude. I was in Bangladesh with Rohingya refugees and a health project for people [a fugir da Birmânia]. It was a lot but it was a million people in a month. Here one million people fled Ukraine in ten days and two million people in ten days. Or, say 20 days we have three million refugees and it is accelerating.
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