Feeding the Poor - Soup Kitchens in Arequipa

19 June 2017

Project - Help Feed the Poor in Arequipa

The poor here in Peru often eat in soup kitchens (or 'comedores populares' in Spanish). Local governments subsidize the cost of the meals so the poor can eat. For one or two soles (about $0.30 to $0.60), they can get an inexpensive meal, maybe their only cooked meal of the day.

Humble soup kitchens like this one take care of feeding many of the poorest of the poor in Peru.

Recently, the city of Arequipa came to us, asking for help with their soup kitchens. Arequipa, the second largest city in Peru, needed help with their 225 soup kitchens to improve the quality of the food being offered to the poor.  Since the city is subsidizing the meals, they wanted to help ensure consistent and nutritious food. The small soup kitchens, typically run by poor people themselves from humble little houses throughout the city, each feed several dozen families every day. The city is mounting a campaign to teach the people running the soup kitchens how to prepare better food.

Inside one of the humble little soup kitchens.

The woven bamboo-mat walls of this soup kitchen promote good air circulation but are perhaps not the most sanitary places for food preparation.

Thousands of poor people in Arequipa depend on these 'Comedores Populares' to provide probably the only cooked meal of the day.

The city asked us to help with this project to improve the soup kitchens by donating pots, pans, plates, utensils, and blenders. We reviewed this request and got it approved by our Area Welfare Committee, so our work began by ordering the supplies.  We will help all 225 soup kitchens with a donation of 900 pots, thousands of plates and utensils, and other goods.

In Search of Pots for Soup Kitchens

Our job was to review the pots we are donating to the soup kitchens to ensure we are getting things that will last. Our journey this week was to accompany the church purchasing agent, Miguel Hurtado, to review the quality of products offered by vendors throughout Lima.

We thought we would travel from showroom to showroom, reviewing what vendors had to offer. What came next was a huge surprise for us.

Miguel Hurtado, church purchasing agent, with us and some of the 900 pots we will purchase. It looks like we are in a showroom, but we were actually in the factory where the pots were being made just a few feet away.

The showrooms we thought we were visiting turned out to be factories where they made the pots out of aluminum sheets or disks the size of large pizzas. We examined the final products right in the factories.

Sheets of aluminum are stamped out to create disks the size of a large pizza that are turned into the pots.

An aluminum disk is put into a spinning lathe and is bent around a wooden form to create the pot. The four factories we visited were loud, dirty places.

This worker just finished making the small aluminum pot that he is touching with his left hand. When finished, he would pull the pot off the lathe, toss it into the pile of pots behind him, and insert the next disk. Time from start to finish - about 2 minutes.

There were no safety precautions in any of these sweat-shop factories. If someone fell into their equipment - too bad. A belt wrapped around each worker to help hold him close to the lathe so he could use his body weight to help shape each pot. Also, note that no one wore face protection, hearing protection, or masks to protect from all the aluminum dust in the air.

A unique-shaped pot (although we weren't buying these, they were cool looking). This size pot took about 3 minutes to shape using an assortment of metal tools seen beneath the lathe. Note the large pizza-sized aluminum disks sitting on the floor to the left from which the pots were made.

I covered my eyes in these factories, fearing a piece of aluminum would fly through the air and blind me.

Some pots were huge. We joked that the biggest pots could hold a few people and were a popular item to ship to certain areas of Africa!

The largest pots take two people to make. Both of these workers held the metal shaping tool that bent the large aluminum disk into a pot as it spun on the lathe.

An order for 900 pots would take only about 2 weeks for any of these factories to crank out (with shifts working around the clock).

The finished product looks nice and hopefully will last under the heavy abuse of the soup kitchens. (Sandy was a little overdressed in this beautiful skirt and heels in these dirty factories. However, the assignment to visit the factories was thrown on us at the last minute after we got to the office that day, so we went from place to place in our nice clothing).

The donations we are making for this project will hopefully make a difference in many lives. This project also involves the city of Arequipa training all of the workers in the soup kitchens in hygiene and nutrition. This partnership between us and the city is the type of project we like to pursue because it involves more than just a handout. It leads to growth of everyone involved and blesses the lives of those that could not do something for themselves without some help.

More of What We Do

Most of our days are spent in the office, managing the many humanitarian projects we have in the works.

Working in our office, managing the many projects we have running simultaneously here in Peru.

The variety of tasks we perform is at times staggering. One day I kept track of things I worked on (Sandy has a similarly complex list).

--  Translated emergency status document into English describing Venezuelan refugees in Brazil to send to church leaders in Salt Lake City. 

--   Revised a video presentation of humanitarian projects in Riberalta, Bolivia, for final production. This video goes to the Area Welfare Committee to approve projects. 

--   Worked an international shipping issue in Lima to locate an original customs document required to release 300 wheelchairs from Peruvian customs. This required multiple calls to the church International Shipping Department in Salt Lake City and the National Rehabilitation Institute here in Lima. 

--   Confirmed with Finance Department that payment is being made for the doors and stairs a vendor supplied for the 18 clean-water wells we are providing in Monsefú. We needed to expedite the payment to the vendor because his wife is in the hospital and he needed to pay for the surgery. 

--   Worked with our supplier of ultrasound medical devices for our donations in Cerro de Pasco and Cayma. These donations to remote medical clinics will hopefully reduce maternal and newborn deaths in these poor and isolated regions. 

--   Reviewed and revised a video for the 50 wells the church has provided in the jungles of Ucayali. Only 25% of the people in this region have clean, potable water. This video now goes to the Area Welfare Committee. 

--   Translated a second Venezuelan emergency status document into English to send to church leaders in Salt Lake City. This document seeks an additional $1.5 million in emergency humanitarian aid to help with the desperate political situation in Venezuela that is causing starvation and large numbers of refugees fleeing the country. 

We love the work we are doing, but at times it makes our heads spin with the variety of assignments we are juggling.

Sandy keeping her fingers on the multiple humanitarian projects she touches every day.

Journey to Plaza Josfel

Saturday is our day off (our preparation day), so we try to unwind a little. This week we discovered a new place to shop (called Plaza Josfel) located a few miles from us. The plaza was enormous - more than 1,500 stores - and sells everything you could dream of. This place is where real Peruvians shop at a host of little mom-and-pop stores.

Unassuming on the outside, the Plaza Josfel held over 1,500 stores.

Hundreds of shoe stores, clothing stores, hardware stores, meat markets, etc., filled this place. Prices were rock bottom. We found things here we never could have bought at the fancy malls.

We spent hours in this place among the many, many stores and good deals. Sandy bought skirts and a sweater; I bought sunflower seeds, chocolate chips, and a hat. There were no tourists here, only real Peruvians.

Hundreds of shops selling all kinds of meat. If you touched these chickens and they were still warm, it meant that they were fresh!

Typical of the myriad shops, most of the owners were small business owners selling anything they could think to sell.  This shop sold nothing but salsas. 

More than a hundred beauty salons and barber shops filled the plaza.

Everything you could dream of under one roof. We and the other senior couple with us were the only non-Peruvians in the place.

Plaza Josfel - what a find. Every day is an adventure here in Peru!

And so our work goes on in ways that we never imagined. What a blessing this mission continues to be for us (and hopefully for the people we serve).