to the cook Jose Andres, the words always escape him like a torrent. He eats them, with a rushed speech and eternal answers that leave little space for the interlocutor. There are few exceptions to that behavior. One of them, when the word “Bucha” is pronounced.
“I first got there on April 1,” he repeats over and over, “crossing under the bridge,” in a suddenly restrained voice. Bucha is the suburb of kyiv in which Russian soldiers killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians In March. “They were everywhere,” recalls the chef from Mieres (Asturias), when he is asked about the corpses. Andrs did not want to post on Twitter, where he has 1.1 million followers, photos. “The journalists already did that, and it seems very good to me,” he justifies. But there is one incident that he does not forget.
“In one house, they found an anti-tank mine under a crib mattress… under a crib mattress,” he insists. “Because, of course, that’s for the family to come back, and put the child in the crib, and we already know what happens then,” she says, as if that weren’t obvious. And then he wonders, “Who can do that? How can you be able to do that?”
Andrs was in Bucha with his NGO, World Central Kitchen (WCK), which has been operating in Ukraine since the start of the war, and which has been the target of two Russian attacks. In April, one of his restaurants in the city of Khrkov was damaged in a Russian cruise missile bombardment. Four collaborators of the organization were injured. On Wednesday, a food wagon was destroyed when a Russian missile hit a Ukrainian train. This time there was no personal injury.
“The Russians are not going after us. The problem is that they bomb everything, and WCK is everywhere,” explains to EL MUNDO Andrs, who has become a solid candidate to win the Nobel Peace Prize and has passed in Ukraine 55 days of the 111 that the war has already lasted in that country. With that experience, his analysis of the actions of some international organizations in the conflict is very critical.
“The big humanitarian aid organizations should be more transparent. The Red Cross and the UN World Food Program are not transparent,” explains the cook. By ‘transparent’ he means “not that they are doing anything illegal, but just that it is really known how donor money, both public and private, is being spent.” It is not an easy task. “I’m still learning how to communicate,” he says, referring to WCK.
Sometimes, Andrs’s criticisms go beyond the information that humanitarian aid organizations give their donors. “UNICEF has not been present in the first weeks of the war, when their presence was most needed,” he says. “It was enough that they had mounted [centros de ayuda] in the same places where we were; that they had put trained people there, capable of acting when they saw the children walking alone with their mothers’ phones in the palm of their hands. It was enough to act automatically on these children, check who they were, try to locate their relatives, and if that was not possible, place them in a protected shelter, “he explains.
That would have prevented “what has happened, which is that many Ukrainian children have fallen into the hands of who knows who. Many times they have been picked up by good-hearted organizations and good people, but other times they have ended up in the hands of people we do not know.” what intentions do they have with those children? The result “is that Unicef has failed the children of Ukraine.”
The goal of this Spanish citizen born in the United States who turns 53 in four weeks is for WCK to be able to explain to its donors what it does with their money. While talking to EL MUNDO in ‘Jaleo’-the restaurant where he began his journey in Washington 29 years ago-he shows a map of Ukraine on his mobile phone with all the activities he develops there.
More than 4,000 food distribution points
The map shows how in one restaurant, the NGO has already served 77,000 meals. In a ‘takeaway’, to pick up the food and take it away, another 5,150. they are just part of an insanely large operation, with more than 510 restaurants and 4,230 food distribution points in 400 urban centers across Ukraine that have served 48.2 million hot meals to date, and are currently providing around half a million each day. TotalWCK employs “about 6,000 or 7,000” people in Ukrainealthough measuring the organization’s staff is somewhat complicated because “they don’t work for us; they work for the restaurants that work with us and, in turn, in those restaurants there are both employees and volunteers who come. But that’s the good thing for us.” , because in these things you have to be massive”.
This chef, who is from Mieres, Barcelona (he lived there from 6 to 18 years old) and Washington, has met to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine with world leaders such as the presidents of the United States, Joe Bidenand Poland, Andrzej Duda. “Biden is close, human,” he says. “A person like him is probably what he needs right now in America,” he says. Andrs has had a years-long confrontation with Donald Trump over the former president’s anti-immigration policy, and he does not hesitate to describe the assault on the Capitol carried out by supporters of the former president on January 6, 2010, as an “attempted coup.” 2021 to try to prevent the ratification of the results of the presidential elections. Of course, it’s not just a US problem. “The Catalan separatists are doing the same as the Trump supporters,” he says. “You cannot ask for freedom for your ideas and projects and at the same time not give freedom to those who do not think like you.”
Now, when Andrs is asked about a leader he considers a good role model in the 21st century, he hesitates. Until he comes up with a name: “Jeff”. He is Jeff Bezos, the second richest businessman in the world, and one of the biggest donors to Andrs’ aid projects. “Jeff started out driving books to the Post Office to deliver them,” he says, recalling the early days of Amazon, the Internet giant Bezos founded in 1997. “He was just a normal guy,” he says. “Another thing is, now Amazon doesn’t have the same limits as a small business. That’s not a good thing. But Jeff would probably agree to change the regulation so things weren’t like that. We need a lot more Bezos in the world.”
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism