Argentine Coronavirus crisis energizes volunteers

Residents of poor neighbourhoods in the outskirts of Buenos Aires have organized to assist the population with free food, and free security items like masks and aprons as the South American country goes into its first week of quarantine to stop the spread of the new coronavirus.

With a poverty rate of more than 35% according to the latest official figures many people in Argentina are struggling to make ends meet, so a number of people have resorted to soup kitchens.

Since the compulsory total quarantine began, the people who attend the dining room must remove the containers with the food to take them home, since now they cannot sit together at the table located in a small and precarious construction.

Fear of contagion in the poor neighborhoods around Buenos Aires has forced its inhabitants to organize to survive and acts of solidarity multiply to serve children who, due to the suspension of classes, no longer have a meal guaranteed.

At the community dining room "La hora feliz" located in the municipality of Lanús, south of the capital, volunteers used to give lunch three times a week in the past but now with the quarantine they are cooking every day.

Not far from the soup kitchen, a group of women from a textile cooperative make free masks and aprons for the cooks and municipality workers.

The cooperative was created to provide income to unemployed women, but now they are producing items needed to fight the spread of the outbreak.

In Argentina, the coronavirus has infected 589 people and killed 12.