'Skipping meals': Germany's low-income families hit hard by gas crisis

BERLIN –  It is only within the last few months that Monique Ruck, a 34-year-old mother of three, has started coming to the recreational centre close to her home in the east of the German capital that is run by a local children’s anti-poverty aid organization called Die Arche (The Ark). 

The sole parent to three children aged 10, seven and two years old, she has started to visit the centre a few times during the week with her youngest daughter, where alongside a playground, indoor leisure facilities and learning materials, the mother and daughter are able to access the daily lunches the organization provides to families.

It is a step Ruck has had to take to help her manage her current situation amid an increase in energy prices that has hit Germany, the European country most reliant on Russian resources, hard following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in late February. 

Speaking to TRT World in the playground while her daughter plays nearby, she says her family is going through a difficult time. 

“It’s not the energy prices that have gone up; costs for food and the car have also increased,” she says.

 “I need to use the car every day to take the children to school but I don’t know what kind of situation I would be in if the car broke down. I am very worried about the coming months. I know I’m not the only one in this position, everyone is experiencing hardships, but it is worrying because no one knows what is going to happen.”

Die Arche’s spokesman Wolfgang Buescher says the NGO supports more than 5,000 families from lower socio-economic backgrounds across the country, and around 1,800 families in Berlin  - 95 percent of whom are single mothers - in areas such as advice, food and leisure and educational activities. He tells TRT World that in the two decades he has been working in the city, he has never seen a situation as serious as this.

“We now have parents telling us that they are unable to feed their children meals at lunchtimes and so have started skipping meals so they have something to give them for dinner,” he says.

Buescher says the charity, which has also seen a drop in private donations in recent months, says they are expecting to see the number of families coming to their centres increase in the months ahead. “It is likely that we will see more families from Ukraine as well as families from Arab countries who arrived in previous years. It is difficult to say what will happen in the future.”

"A big shock"

Single-parent families are among the many who are currently facing challenges amid the country’s economic crisis and high levels of inflation, recorded at its highest in nearly five decades in late summer. 

Indian-born data engineer Abi Saripalli, 34, has been living in Berlin for around a decade and recently moved into a new home close to the city centre. The married mother of one, whose daughter is five-years-old, says that she and her husband have already started to implement solutions - albeit short-term ones - to help them manage the expected increases that their gas and electric company have already warned them about.

“We are paying around 90 Euros for heating and electricity per month now and we have been warned that this could double per month for the same amount of usage,” she says. “We have not been turning on the heating and have brought more warm clothes as well as more energy-efficient lights. It isn’t too cold in the mornings yet, but evenings are starting to get chilly and so we put on our sweaters. From November, it will start getting colder so we will have to start putting on the heating in the mornings.”

Saripalli says she has noticed how the adjustment has been easier for her daughter compared with her and her husband. She adds, “Climate awareness exists a lot in schools and kindergartens here so for children what is happening is not a big shock. It is more so for adults because we haven’t been trained as kids to think about umweltschutz (environmental protection). My husband and I have to remind each other to do things like turn off lights but my daughter is much better at this and turns things off for me. Or when I turn on the tap and let the water run for even a few seconds, she tells me, 'Mommy, you need to turn the tap off because fishes won't have water in the pond otherwise'.”

Small and middle-size businesses - including bakeries, manufacturers and hotels are also feeling the effects of the crisis. Some 718 German entities became insolvent in August, a 26 percent jump over the previous year, according to theIWH economic institute. 

Wellness centres and spas, hugely popular culture in Germany, are already among those forced to change their energy consumption patterns as winter sets in. It is a process that Helga Roehle, the 64-year-old manager at the Hamam Berlin, Germany’s oldest Turkish bathing centre in the southeastern district Kreuzberg, has already begun. 

Situated within one of the area’s most iconic buildings, the Schokofabrik - a former chocolate factory that has been serving as a self-organised space offering classes, sports and other activities for women and girls for four decades - the hamam relies on large amounts of energy usage across the seven days a week that it is open. 

As Roehle says, “We use a lot of energy to heat the sauna and spa areas and we have been told that prices could rise six times more than what we are paying now. In order to try and prepare for the winter months ahead, we have started to implement measures such as electricity production on our roof and explore the reduction of energy usage in the hamam through new technologies.”

Roehle says that hamam, which has a rotating staff number of around 50 people, will also need to increase the costs of its treatments, including Kese (full body peeling) and Sabunlama (soap massage) by around 10 percent, which will go into effect this month. 

“The general mood in the hamam is one of worry and concern. We have just come out of the pandemic and the forced closure during that period, now we have the war in Ukraine and we still have the backdrop of climate change. We hope this can all come to an end soon,” she says.