Lending a hand

MATAMOROS — While some schools endeavor to bring meals like mom makes to their students, at Franklin Delano Roosevelt Elementary school in Matamoros, moms are brought to the school to make students meals.

“Who better to make them lunch,” reasoned Principal Maria de Los Angeles Galvan Tapia. “They’re cooking for their kids, so obviously they want to feed them well.”

Out of necessity more than careful planning, moms at Franklin, as the school is known across the city, take turns cooking lunch for 550 hungry children.

Without government funding for a school lunch program, schools in Mexico employ a variety of low cost alternatives, usually on the parents’ dime.

At Franklin, parents have taken up the cause of organizing meals for their students. Responsibilities for the week rotate among parents, mostly mothers.

On a typical sweltering morning in August, Soledad Treviño, Carmen Ortega and Socorro Gutierrez hurriedly assembled lunch in Franklin’s kitchen.

On the menu were eight pepperoni pizzas, dozens of taquitos, a table covered with small Styrofoam bowls full of nacho chips and a bubbling bowl of queso on the side, two dozen kilos of tortillas and a cooking pan full of eggs and chorizo.

A microwave, gas fired stove and a refrigerator are the only appliances in the otherwise decaying kitchen.

“The pizza will be gone first,” Treviño said. “Tacos will probably be next. By the time lunch is over this will all be gone.”

Treviño is the president of the group of sixth-graders’ parents, and Ortega is secretary.

Before the first day of school the more experienced parents gather the novice parents together for a crash course in school lunch responsibilities.

Each grade elects officers who assign a group of five or six moms to cook for a turn of one week. The school year runs from late August through the first week of July, so moms are sure to have lunch duties several times in the year.

Treviño and Ortega are old hats on the lunch beat, stocking up on the week’s rations over the weekend. They are sure to make back their investment by week’s end, despite offering meals for just six pesos.

“It needs to be cheap,” Ortega said. “We don’t want to sell them something expensive that they couldn’t afford.”

In the United States, school lunch programs in some form have been in existence for more than 100 years. It wasn’t until the National School Lunch Act of 1946 was approved that a consistent program to offer children a “nutritious” meal emerged.

In Mexico, however, that has not been the case. Many schools offer an affordable meal option, but without government financial assistance or nutritional supervision.

Where funding is scarce, parents are called on for support, according to Secretary of Education Jose Luis Cuellar Ornelas.

They are in fact the single greatest assets to schools, Cuellar maintains.

At 10:20 a.m. sharp, classroom doors are opened, unleashing a mob of hungry students.

Galvan, the school principal, picks up a microphone in the middle of the swarm, optimistically attempting to bring order. Throughout the half-hour lunch her muffled voice issues unheeded commands over the din of children screeching.

When the students hit the kitchen window, Treviño and her fellow mothers take orders like traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

“One slice of pizza,” Treviño repeats the order and drops coins into a Styrofoam cup. “And a scoop of ice cream.”

The mothers also count on the assistance of a small group of students who have been selected on that day to help out. Antonio Gutierrez is one of them.

“My favorite subject is math,” he announces, apropos of nothing.

The young Gutierrez works along side his mother, selling potato chips. He pops open a bag and applies hot sauce liberally to the salty snack.

The school has a few red plastic Coca-Cola picnic tables for students who choose to sit and eat. Most, however, run with their food held tightly in their fists.

“In a couple weeks we’re going to move all this inside,” Galvan said. “We’re moving the computer lab upstairs and turning the room into a cafeteria.”

For the time being, lunch is controlled chaos.

For Treviño this year is bittersweet. It will be her last as her youngest child is sixth-grader and will graduate at the end of the year.

“I have four children so you can imagine how long I’ve been doing this,” Treviño said. “After so many years I’m sure I’ll miss it. You grow fond of it.”