Defense Minister Javier García said in the afternoon: «task accomplished today. Because the most important thing was to guarantee that a union decision did not have guards for this service, which seems to me to be a limit that should not have been exceeded. When it happened we said that the Ministry of Defense was willing to collaborate through the Armed Forces with the education authorities».
He added that “the education authorities did a planning where they said that there were points that they had no way of covering due to distance or different circumstances.”
This morning at the height of the development of the task, the coordinator of the Ministry of Defense, Agustín Lescano, explained that “today we are working in six educational centers, five in Canelones and one in Montevideo, which was what was agreed with Primary to be able to provide food to the children.
“We are working with around 20 troops in the six places that are deployed. We receive the food from a company contracted by Primary and we make the final distribution, which is the delivery, to the parents or the children, of the food,” Lescano said at school 158 in Puntas de Peñarol.
He indicated that approximately 500 food items are for delivery. “It is the contingency device that we have set up for strike days in schools that are not open or do not have the staff to attend the dining rooms.” he held her.
“For the Ministry of Defense, working with the three forces is a contribution to society and being able to guarantee food for all school children,” he said.
The director of the Primary Feeding Program, Rosa Lezué, explained that “today we have three devices: schools that are open and function normally in Montevideo and throughout the country, we have closed schools that their students attend to raise food in the open schools that we established as headquarters, and then we have six schools in which we are working with the collaboration of the Ministry of Defense, because we had no way of accessing officials who could be in charge of delivering the food.
There is one here where we are, and in Canelones, which is further away, we had problems in La Floresta, Soca, Canelón Chico, San Bautista and San Eugenio, which are very remote schools where there are a significant number of children who are users of the food service and we had no possibility of access »he explained.
He indicated that “as for the menu, they are varied, because each company determines its menu, they are what we consider an emergency menu. Today here we have Easter, squash cake and fruit for dessert. Also in other places it can be Milanese accompanied with vegetables and some dessert such as fruit or the one that the company has prepared.
He added that “children can come, families can come, not necessarily come with the children and they can come from the school where we are and from all the nearby schools or from anywhere. It can happen that a child today, due to unemployment, is at his grandmother’s house and it is not the place where he attends his school, but he can also come to pick up ». The task was carried out between 11 and 13 hours.
