A 20-year-old student from Australia has gone viral after volunteering to cook thousands of meals for healthcare workers who are fighting the pandemic.
To make sure valued frontliners wouldn’t be hungry while saving lives, Monash University student Alex Dekker has embarked on a mission to cook and provide meals to workers who are battling the virus.
After kick-starting the Alex Makes Meals initiative, the 20-year-old Melbourne-based student quickly realized that the demand for proper meals is huge in the times of crisis.
Speaking of how he came upon the idea to feed healthcare workers, Alex explained it all started when he began cooking for his sister, who works as a doctor, after seeing she only had power bars to eat during her long shifts.
To help others in a similar situation, Alex created a Facebook post in which he offered free meals to frontliners only to be inundated with requests.
“I really just wanted to make lasagna for my sister, but in the first 40 hours I had 60 respondents and from there it kind of ballooned,” the 20-year-old said in an interview with Sydney Morning Herald.
To keep up with the high demand for proper food, Alex managed to get ahold of commercial cooking space.
Since then, the hardworking student has enlisted dozens of helpers who volunteered to help him prepare and deliver meals to over six hundred healthcare workers.
“I’m on the phone about 10 to 15 hours a day now with people who have catering companies and restaurants offering to help, it’s all been volunteers,” the young man added.
“Because this is one of the only good things to come out of this crisis, the community is leaping onto it. The mountain of support we’ve got – we just can’t believe it.”
While Alex was initially paying for the food from his own pocket, he and the other volunteers now have the support of several businesses and good Samaritans who can donate to the charitable purpose on GoFundMe.
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Replaced!