Argentine volunteers distribute food during crisis

Every day in Buenos Aires dozens of young volunteers are filling thousands of boxes with necessary items to deliver them to people in need during the economic crisis triggered by the new coronavirus.

The operation is set in a huge warehouse in the outskirts of the Argentine capital, where Catholic, Jewish and Evangelical institutions teamed up with companies and NGOs to distribute food for people in dire conditions amid the crisis.

The boxes include several cans of food and produce as well as soap and detergent, all meant to last the beneficiary families for a week.

The project "Seamos Uno" or "Let's be one" goal is to deliver a million boxes in the impoverished areas surrounding Buenos Aires.

So far the initiative has distributed some 250,000 boxes after receiving donations for 450 million of Argentine pesos (6.4 million US dollars) and 770 million pesos (11 million dollars) in goods.

The economic paralysis that has generated compulsory isolation has emptied the pockets of the inhabitants of marginal neighborhoods who lost the "changas," odd, informal jobs.

For them, eating is the greatest urgency day by day.

In Ciudad Evita, in Buenos Aires outskirts, Alberto Ramírez and his wife Mónica Albarracín, received a first box days ago.

The box is complementary and necessary sustenance for their monthly government subsidy of about 100 dollars.

Ramirez is elective for an emergency fund of 150 dollars a month that the government distributes to people in need during the lockdown, but he has not received it yet.

The boxes by "Seamos Uno" are aimed as families like them, who do not receive enough government support, some of them elderly or with health problems.

Around 35 percent of the population in Argentina, who is equally coping with a staggering 53.8 percent of inflation. Up to Friday Argentine authorities have reported 7,134 COVID-19 cases and 353 deaths.