Pandemic-hit poor pooling their supplies

LIMA, Peru — Clara Arango wakes at 4 a.m. daily and checks on the ingredients for breakfast.

Eighteen pounds of oats, 13 pounds of sugar and a pound of cinnamon sticks, all ready. An hour later, Arango, 43, is using a shovel to stir 30 gallons of sweet oatmeal in a stainless-steel pot over a fire of wood scraps alongside a cinder-block community center in the hills overlooking Peru’s capital.

By 9 a.m., more than 150 of Arango’s neighbors in New Hope have paid 14 cents each for a plastic bowl of oatmeal from the “community pot,” a phenomenon that has become ubiquitous across Peru in recent months as coronavirus quarantines and shutdowns have left millions of poor people with no way to feed their families.

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.

Economic shutdowns have forced poor Peruvians, Argentines and tens of millions of others to fall back on community-based efforts unseen in large numbers since crises like Peru’s 1990s civil war or Argentina’s financial crash two decades ago.

Still, without unemployment benefits or the ability to work from home, a cut-price plastic bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, some lentil stew or noodles in tomato sauce for lunch, and leftovers for dinner aren’t proving enough to keep poor Latin Americans from leaving their homes each day to earn a living as construction workers, street vendors or day laborers.

The inability to keep people at home is proving a major factor in the spread of the coronavirus around the continent, where new cases and deaths are rising unchecked and intensive care wards are reaching their limits.

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.

And Peru is facing a 12 percent drop in gross domestic product this year, one of the worst recessions in the hemisphere, according to the World Bank.

“I barely have anything to eat at home,” Arango said. ”Here I have a community pot and I can pool my resources with my neighbors and we can support each other and work together.”