Peruvians organise community kitchens to stop hunger

As Peru battles with the ongoing pandemic three months into lockdown, Lima residents are organizing to help feed their neighbors.

Clara Arango wakes at 4 a.m. daily to make a "community pot" with eighteen pounds of oats, using reclaimed wood to light a fire in the street and feed more than 150 people.

Arango lost her job as a janitor when her employer closed his shopping mall in Lima's wealthiest neighborhood due to the antivirus shutdown that began on March 16.

A single mother of two, Arango said is better for her to pool her resources with her neighbors to support each other.

"Community pots"  are a phenomenon that's become ubiquitous across Peru in recent months, and recent independent polls believe than more than a third of Peru's 32 million are involved in community cooking.

Often operating with help from the Catholic Church and private charities, soup kitchens and community pots have become a symbol of the conundrum facing a region where most of the working population labors outside the formal economy.

Without unemployment benefits or enough food, poor Latin Americans are still leaving their homes each day to earn a living as construction workers, street vendors or other types of day laborers.

The inability to keep people at home is proving a major factor in the spread of the coronavirus around the continent.

Despite some of the strictest antivirus measures in the region, Peru has diagnosed 237,000 cases of coronavirus and counted 7,000 deaths, the highest number of cases per capita in the region and the second-highest per capita count of deaths.

Furthermore, the number of infections overall is thought to be far higher because many people have not been tested, and studies suggest people can be infected with the virus without feeling sick.