‘Looking for a Smile ’ in the poorest dining rooms of Callao
Thanks to the initiative of the Perfecta Radio Foundation, dozens of children and older adults in one of the regions hardest hit by the pandemic in Peru, can improve their diet.
To reach the last corner of the Gambetta human settlement in the Callao region, where poverty and hunger are the daily bread, is to arrive in one of the most forgotten and needy areas in all of Lima.
There, a few steps from the train rails, a group of brave women with the support, still incipient of the local authorities, carry out one of the most deprived soup kitchens of the aforementioned region, called ‘Niños de Jesús’.
Elsa Mabel Gutiérrez, is the president of this dining room and together with other mothers in the area, they manage every day to make sure they reach the few provisions they have and thus feed more than fifty people, mostly children and Older adults with very low economic resources, who arrive from Monday to Saturday for a plate of food.
A few blocks from that place, in the same human settlement Gambetta, another popular soup kitchen called «Señor de los Milagros» has been operating since 1988. This place, which for many years received its most needy neighbors between wooden walls and mats, now at least is already a place of noble material thanks to the effort and insistence of its directives, which managed to get the regional authorities to finance the construction. and equipment of the enclosure.
Mrs. Carmen Roca, vice president of the ‘Señor de los Milagros’ dining room, says that despite the fact that they have some 60 registered people who receive a food ration every day, many times, more people tend to arrive, making the provisions granted by the provincial municipality insufficient.
All for the children
Since August 2021, the Perfecta Radio Foundation, through its initiative Looking for a Smile, has provided support to these two soup kitchens by donating basic food products and other items that, in general, they do not usually receive as part of the sustenance delivered by the municipality.
The president of the Foundation, Fernando Chappell Merino, pointed out that, Looking for a Smile, is one of the projects that has given the greatest satisfaction to the non-profit organization that he presides, since the main objective is to join the effort made by these women and men (without any remuneration) in charge of the management of both dining rooms and collaborating with bringing better nutrition to children and the elderly.
