When Sirry Jonasdottir found out Icelanders were struggling to send their children to school because of the country’s financial crisis, she’d had enough.

“Parents were calling their children sick for the first days as they couldn’t afford the books or the pencils,” Jonasdottir says. “There was a single mother with three sons and she could not afford to put all of them to school. That really, really, shocked me.”

Jonasdottir, 37, and her partner, Veigar Margeirsson, 37, are two ex-pat Icelanders living in Los Angeles, California. As well as running their music production company, they’ve set up a charity called Silver Lining, to help raise money for fellow Icelanders most affected by the country’s financial crisis.

Since the crisis began in October 2008, on the surface things didn’t look that bad. Yet according to Margeirsson there’s a silent problem running deep. “A lot of people who need this help are extremely embarrassed and ashamed,” he says. “So sometimes it looks like things are not so bad. But when we talk to the people who are giving out the food they say it’s worse than ever.”

One of those groups giving out the food in Iceland is the Family Help Center. They’ve been having 300 families a week use the service according to Jonasdottir. However, with the Christmas period fast approaching, they’re expecting it’s going to be more than double that number for the month of December.

“We hear from the Family Help Center they really are nervous,” she explains. “They know that in December… it’s just going to be needed more than ever because… you want a decent meal on Christmas.”

Charity origins

Back in the summer Jonasdottir and Margeirsson knew Christmas would be a time of increased need. So their charity went from an idea to a functioning non-profit within a month. Their goal is to send the sum of money they collect before the end of the year and hope people abroad can now donate without having to spend an extra $40 wiring the money to Iceland.

Since the charity began donations have come in from all over the world, including Luxemburg, Denmark and other Scandinavian countries.

Margeirsson is also seeing a lot of donations from people that have lost touch with Iceland, who seem to like the fact that somebody is trying to help. “It also shows that even though they’ve been away for a long time… they still sincerely care about their home country,” he says. “Even though we live here we’re still Icelanders.”

Initial donations

The first person to donate to the charity was 33-year-old Karl Jonsson. He’s an Icelander living abroad for the past 12 years, having co-founded a business based out of Singapore, with offices in Irvine, California.

“(I’ve) always been very proud of my country and where I come from. It has been very sad seeing the collapse over the last year,” Jonsson explains. “I felt bad that I couldn’t do anything. It’s not easy to transfer money to Iceland.”

So he opened his wallet to the tune of a few hundred dollars, which with the fall in the value of the Icelandic Krona, can go a long way, he says.

It’s a generous donation, even with the fall of the currency. Margeirsson hopes that many people will give whatever they can give, big or small.

As 2010 approaches then, the problems in Iceland are worse than they have ever been in the last several decades.“Unfortunately… predictions are… it’s not going to get better for a while,” he adds.

For more information on Silver Lining visit: http://www.silverliningcharity.org/

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http://bit.ly/3W3nnu

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Official Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thjodfundur2009
Flickr Search: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Þjóðfundur
YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/thjodfundur2009
Official web site (English): http://www.thjodfundur2009.is/english
Official web site (Icelandic): http://www.thjodfundur2009.is
Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/thjodfundur2009
Twitter hash tag: #thf09

Iceland Weather Report background stories

Ministering to the grass root
http://icelandweatherreport.com/2009/02/ministering-to-the-grass-root.html
Power to the Ants
http://icelandweatherreport.com/2009/10/power-to-the-ants.html
Great National Assembly, flawlessly organized
http://icelandweatherreport.com/2009/11/great-national-assembly-flawlessly-organized.html

- Translation by Icelandic Reddit user Hundasupa. THANK YOU!

She came to the meeting with an open mind and her expectations were, of course, there would be some harmony in the nation. She believes the nation has the same views and many people feel the same. She thinks it’s really coming to the surface right away just as she thought it would. She feel’s like she recognizes faces on every table but maybe that just reminds you how small of a nation we really are and how close we are to each other and maybe it will be easier to come closer together.

The discussions have really been interesting and a lot of variety on my table with very different ideas in separate directions and very interesting discussions and very balanced in them as well. Then there is talk about how well the event was managed and controlled.

I feel that there is much undercurrent, alot of discussions and opinions that would really help if they would be able to reach the government, which is not doing too good and I hope it will get to them. I hope that there will be some strong message that will reach the government.

This is a short radio piece introducing the Silver Lining charity. It’s a charity set up in the wake of the Icelandic financial crisis of October 2008. It’s headed by two ex-pat Icelanders who live in Los Angeles, California. Veigar Margeirsson is an Icelandic composer who has created music for many Hollywood movies including Batman Begins, Ironman and The Da Vinci Code. His partner, Sirry Jonasdottir, is the charity operations manager. They took the time to speak with me at length about what Silver Lining is and what its goals are. Another ex-pat Icelander and first person to donate to the charity, Karl Jonsson, also spoke with me. His interview, including the Margeirsson and Jonasdottir interview will become a full audio package with complementing print story in the very near future.

Then throughout the day more media began to appear, all regarding the decision of Iceland’s McDonald’s franchise owner to shut up shop. And that’s an important difference. As Alda Sigmundsdóttir writes in the Guardian newspaper:

They are right that the McDonald’s closure is related to the country’s economic meltdown. The rest is a slight misrepresentation. Thing is, McDonald’s isn’t actually packing up and going home. The Icelandic owners of the McDonald’s franchise have decided to drop it. They will still run a burger joint in the same location, but under a different name – and using only domestic ingredients.

The BBC were next up with a video report entitled: No more Happy Meals for Iceland (har har headline writer, would you like a prize for being so witty! It’s almost as good as the Globe’s “The big whack”).

Rhiannon and Sam, two British ex-pats living in the country, chimed in with these anecdotal tidbits to round out the picture:

I have only ever been to McDonald’s once in Iceland; it was the most expensive burger I have ever eaten. The average cost for a MaccyD´s in England is roughly 4 pounds. Here I paid nearly 10 pounds!

I really want to say this is the last post on the issue, but I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this just yet.

This seems to have been the biggest news out of Iceland yesterday thanks to a Bloomberg story which reported:

Iceland’s McDonald’s Corp. restaurants will be closed at the end of the month after the collapse of the krona eroded profits at the fast-food chain, McDonald’s franchise holder Lyst ehf said.

McDonald’s in Iceland, which imports most of the ingredients it uses in its meals, will shut after costs doubled over the past year, Lyst said in an e-mailed statement today. The franchise holder said it doesn’t expect the situation to change in the short term.

“We would have to raise our prices by 20 percent to get the margin needed on our products,” Magnus Ogmundsson, Lyst chief executive officer, said in a phone interview. “That would have sent a Big Mac to 780 kronur” ($6.36), compared with the 650 kronur it costs today, he said.

The story also got over 700 upvotes on Reddit, taking it to the front page with 600 plus comments.

As one commentator pointed out:

If I wanted to put this bluntly, I would say: Who gives a frag? There is no news value to this really.

The BBC’s World Service, however, would beg to differ. Iceland’s top bloggers received a call from them and had this to say on Twitter after:

“Just interviewed by BBC World Service. They wanted to know if we were terribly distraught about McDonald’s leaving… I said we were weeping uncontrollably into our McShakes, choking on our McFries… we thought we’d at last held civilization in our hands, and to have it so cruelly snatched away **SOB**