(25 Dec 2012)
1. Wide tilt up of people eating at Sant’Egidio Christmas lunch, inside Santa Maria in Trastevere basilica
2. Medium tilt up of people eating and volunteers
3. Close up old lady eating
4. Medium of volunteers serving lunch
5. SOUNDBITE: (English) Mario Marazziti, Sant’Egidio Community spokesman:
“I find that there is a link between the crisis over the last years, not just this year, and the increase of poverty among the low middle class. Among the people who have a normal life, but they miss one week to the end of the month. Or now in this moment there is a problem of housing, paying the rent and in Italy we don’t have the structural instrument to fight the structural poverty, that is the salary, that is the minimum wage of social integration.”
6. Medium of nun serving lunch
7. Government minister Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Sant’Egidio Community, arriving
8. SOUNDBITE: (Italian) Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Sant’Egidio Community and government minister:
“Data on poverty have worsened. It is important to keep this in mind, but on the other hand solidarity is increasing.”
9. Medium of people eating
10. Close up of old lady opening Christmas presents
11. Medium of children with Santa Claus hats
STORYLINE:
Christmas charity volunteers in Rome counted the human cost of the Italian recession on Tuesday, handing out free meals to the poor, homeless and the elderly.
In 1982, forty-seven recipients of the first Christmas meals from the Sant’Egidio community were mainly homeless.
In 2012 numbers who turned up for a free lunch organised by the community at one of the oldest basilicas in the city had grown to ten times that figure and most were just too poverty-stricken to afford a proper Christmas dinner.
The Community says it handed out 230 tons (tonnes) of food in 2012, with the help of 2,000 volunteers.
Mario Marazziti, a spokesman of the Sant’Egidio Community, claimed a link between Italy’s economic crisis and an increase of poverty among the low middle class.
“There is a problem of housing, paying the rent, and in Italy we don’t have the structural instrument to fight the structural poverty,” he said.
Now the community is planning to distribute 10,000 meals in Rome, another 20,000 in 60 cities across Italy and more then 150,000 worldwide.
And Italy’s Institute of Statistics (Istat) has reported that the risk of poverty in Italy increased by almost four percent between 2010 and 2011, now affecting more than a quarter of the population.
According to Istat, since 2010 the number of Italians who can not afford a one-week of vacation has increased by seven percent to almost half the population, the number who don’t have enough to heat their homes money has gone up by a similar figure and the number who can’t buy a proper meal at least three times a week has reached 46 percent of the population.
Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP_Archive
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/APArchives
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/APNews/
You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/85a736c6a477f4aa83f981c7a933d7fa