The diner “Manos de María” caters for undernourished children. The goal of this diner is to prevent the sad consequences of malnutrition. For this reason, this program encompasses pregnant women, breast-feeding mothers and children under 5 years old who do not have access to the schools’ lunchrooms.

Although not all of these children regain normal weight, we have not experienced acute cases of malnutrition. Those cases which really are cause for concern are sent to medical specialists.

In some particular cases, lunch boxes are prepared for the night and on Fridays, some families receive a carton of milk and cereal for the weekend.

Periodically, we have information meetings and workshops with the parents. Such a practice has rendered very good results because it allows us to keep permanent contact with the families and fosters them to commit themselves with the objectives of our project. Our goal is twofold: that parents get informed and that, at the same time, they raise awareness of their children’s problem.

This is a home for children in a situation of risk derived from the San Martín Children’s Court. We offer them comprehensive assistance.

The children attend the schools of their neighbourhood, where they have presented no difficulties of adaptation or study. We offer tutorial supervision for those children who need more personalized attention.

The children’s health is our duty and it is supervised by both health professionals that are volunteers of the foundation and paediatricians from the Health Centre of the area.

One of the most important targets of our project is to achieve the children’s incorporation back to their families. To attain this objective, we work in permanent connection with the Juvenile Court and the minors’ families. We pay regular visits to the families’ homes and encourage them to visit their children at the Home. We provide them as much support as we can.

MEDICAL ATTENTION
The doctor’s office is opened twice a week and provides free medical attention and medication to ambulatory patients.

We help people who have no medical insurance and therefore have to resort to the closest public health services, where, in most cases, their health problems cannot be solved. We collaborate and participate in health campaigns organized both by the governmental and private institutions. We also promote vaccinating campaigns.


DENTIST ATTENTION
We work three days a week providing dental care and implementing a children’s dental programme together with the School of Dentistry. We reach more than 80 patients a month.

We count on three dentist’s chairs with equipment that permits us to work efficiently on cavity treatments, extractions and root canal treatments.

With the little ones, we mainly work on prevention and we run two prevention campaigns annually together with the School of Dentistry.


FOOD DISTRIBUTION
We distribute provisions to 300 families with no economic resources.

The bags of food are distributed on Saturdays on a monthly or weekly basis, according to the needs of each family.

The benefited families are visited by a team of social workers who asses each family’s situation. They are in charge of keeping the list of families up to date; enrolling and discharging the beneficiaries according to the degree of hardship they are going through. Waiting lists are also kept.


CLOTHES DISTRIBUTION
On Saturdays, we give out (without charge) used clothes in excellent condition to the families who are enlisted as beneficiaries for the food distribution.

At the beginning of the school year, every year, we hand out shoes and school stationery to some 150 children (most of them are students that receive school support in the Santa Teresita Home).

We also distribute mattresses and furniture that we receive as donations. We must highlight the job that is done when we suffer rain floods, quite frequent in our area, when lots of families lose most of their belongings.


SOCIAL WORK
There’s a team of social workers that interact in all the projects of Manos Abiertas and who are in charge of registering the problems and channelling them to the different teams of work in the foundation.

We periodically visit the beneficiary families in order to get to know their state of affairs and in this way, be able to help them reach solutions to their economic, social or affective problems.

The problems most frequently encountered are: parental neglect, malnutrition, addiction, lack of medical insurance, resulting from lack of steady jobs, and physical and mental handicap.

We help both children and adults with the procedure to obtain their IDs, since without identification papers they have no access to any governmental aid or employment.

We perform periodical census of the nearby population and keep minute record of all the beneficiary families. These records are sent out to the other work teams to make our job more efficient.

This causes school drop outs and, what is worse, social exclusion. The results we have had are encouraging. Our work has proved to help in the socialization of the kids. We also see that they have developed solidarity gestures among themselves: they have not only reduced their fights but also started helping each other.