Next weekend the annual Cáritas collection will take place. Yesterday Cáritas Argentina and the Argentine Social Debt Observatory (ODSA-UCA) of the Argentine Catholic University presented the Report Radiography of poverty in Argentina: social reality and solidarity that is hope. “It is the opportunity not to be indifferent.”
Vatican News
Cáritas Argentina and the Argentine Social Debt Observatory (ODSA-UCA) of the Argentine Catholic University presented in Buenos Aires the report X-ray of poverty in Argentina: social reality and solidarity that is hope within the framework of the Annual Cáritas Collection that It will be held this weekend, on Saturday the 8th and Sunday the 9th, under the motto “Your solidarity is hope.”
The presentation took place at the San Pedro Claver Community Center, of Cáritas Quilmes, and was attended by Mons. Carlos Tissera, Bishop of Quilmes and President of Cáritas Argentina; Eduardo Donza, Researcher and Data Development Coordinator, specialist in Work and Inequality at the Argentine Social Debt Observatory of the UCA; Sofía Zadara, Graduate in Social Work, Executive Director of Cáritas Argentina and Karen Burgos, Social Worker in charge of supporting the Network of Community Centers of Itatí, Solano and Quilmes.
The data presented by Eduardo Douza from ODSA:
Feeding:
- There are 3,500 centers that Cáritas has throughout the country
- 1 in 4 inhabitants suffers from food insecurity
- 10% of the population must “adjust” their meals
- 15% suffer severe food deprivation
Focusing on Greater Buenos Aires/Conurbano Buenos Aires:
- 26% suffer from food insecurity
- 10% severe deprivation
- 50% of children and adolescents (boys, girls and adolescents) under 18 years of age attend soup kitchens at both schools and organizations such as Cáritas and others.
Education Topic:
- 1 in 4 children from 3 to 5 years of age do not systematically attend preschool
- 4% do not systematically attend classes in Primary
- 1 in 10 adolescents do not attend secondary school
- 35% do not finish secondary school because they have to go to work
Work Topic:
- 35% of white workers live in households in poverty
- 50-60% of precarious/unregistered workers live in these same conditions
- 35% of workers belong to a dynamic and productive sector of the economy
- 15% are working in the public sector
- 50% work in an informal sector of the economy: 30% of the workers in the social economy are located here
Importance of this collection for Cáritas
Mons. Carlos Tissera He recalled the importance of the collection to support the projects of the 3,500 Cáritas centers throughout the country. “Cáritas is not just food aid, which is very important. Fundamentally Cáritas wants to show that we are human beings, we are not things. The poor are a human being, with their dignity. And Cáritas wants to be that, to show that both a child, like a young person or an old man, wherever he lives, he is worth what he is: a human being,” he said. “To talk about Caritas is to talk about the capillarity of the Church: we have more than 40,000 volunteers, human people helping beings. humans. “We face a society that tends toward individualism.”
Next, Sofia Zadara, spoke about the task that Cáritas carries out every day, especially in the poorest neighborhoods, trying to provide human promotion responses to many complex social problems. “More than half a million people receive food from Caritas every day. Cáritas carries out programs of education, early childhood, work, habitat, integration of popular neighborhoods, risk and emergency management, food response and institutional development of all Cáritas in the country aimed at training to continue supporting “this mission that day by day day is a concrete and close service.” “We are witnesses of what happens in the neighborhoods, of the hope that moves our teams, that hope that the poorest communities teach us and infect us. And that allows us to think about a better world,” he said.
He also gave a tour of the Cáritas programs: actions carried out in the field of Food Response, the creation of educational spaces: “community spaces with teams, with volunteers prepared to accompany the school educational completion”, both for children and adolescents of adults, “to address early literacy through a specific methodology” and to accompany young people’s university studies through scholarships that help them sustain their careers. And regarding Early Childhood, Zadara explained the care provided to pregnant women and girls and boys up to 6 years old. “We want to prioritize support in those first 1,000 days, due to the state of vulnerability at that stage, where controls have to be carried out and in many places the health system cannot cope. We accompany more than 2,000 families with this program on these issues,” she said.
Social reality
In the data given by Eduardo Donza, it can be detailed that due to the economic situation “there are faces, there are poor or indigent families who experience hunger and are poorly fed; there are unemployed people who cannot access quality work or poor overemployed workers; There are mothers who cannot meet the needs of raising their children, given the lack of resources and time in life that poverty generates; there are young people who cannot enter the workforce, or who cannot complete the studies they would like; integration is difficult for them and babies whose developmental needs are curtailed, both psychologically and physically, due to shortcomings in the first years of life,” he highlighted.
Social economy promotion programs
Those present spoke about the programs to promote the Social and Solidarity Economy (Ecosol), that is, promoting economy and work focused on life and integral development, trying to address the issue of unemployment from community processes.
“We generate work spaces that provide solutions to needs, not only personal but also community needs. It is an option to create networks of people, organizations, families, because it generates goods in the community and allows local development.” Thus, cooperatives, entrepreneurs, productive units are promoted – of which at the national level we have more than 1,000 -, microcredit lines and tool banks, Zadara said.
In reference to the “scourge of drugs,” Zadara stated that “in popular neighborhoods the deterioration it produces is much more complex, because it destroys everything: ties, the possibility of a life project. Opportunities are taken away from the environment and they leave more and more space for drug trafficking. There begins the connection with weapons, with crimes, in addition to the issue of problematic substance use and family violence.” “At Cáritas, she explained, we accompany addictions from a pastoral and community approach. That is, we focus on the person and in that work we rely on the Homes of Christ, promoted by the then Cardinal Bergoglio and we articulate the work with the Drug Addiction Pastoral. We have 250 neighborhood centers throughout the country where ‘we receive life as it comes’ as we say, where we give a comprehensive response, supported by Sedronar through a Community Support Houses program.”
Testimony of solidarity
Karen Burgos, for her part, shared her work experience in the network of Itatí Community Centers, in Quilmes, which daily accompanies about 350 children and 200 young people in popular neighborhoods. “Holding the pot we generate a space of school and containment,” she describes. They also carry out popular education spaces, “spaces of tenderness”, “our thing is to put a little light in so much darkness.”
