More than 50 years has the recipe for Malaga-style fish soup that Margarita Mesa Cabrera treasures among her memories. The same that, at 75 years old, she has wanted to share with other users of the Santa Cruz Home Help Services (SAD), through the book savoring memories. It is an initiative of the winning company, Clece, which has been launched throughout the Archipelago, and with which it has asked its users to share their recipes. That request has become a publication with more than 40 cooking recipes and about 30 participating users.
Last Tuesday, the mayor, José Manuel Bermúdez, went to Margarita’s home to deliver the book to her. This SAD user from Santa Cruz was waiting for him there, with the soup prepared so that both he and the councilor for Social Action, Rosario Gonzalez, they will try it. “They couldn’t stay to eat because they had other commitments, but at least they were able to try it,” Margarita tells DIARIO DE AVISOS.
He admits that it was “a very pleasant surprise”, not only that they came to his house, but also that they brought him the book in which his recipe appears. “The night before, she had prepared the broth, and when the mayor arrived, I put the rice and shellfish in it,” explains Margarita.
How much that when they called her from the Clece coordination to offer to participate, she immediately remembered the Malaga soup and shared it. “I’m not a cook, for the record, I’m a rigged one,” she clarifies with a laugh. “I took some things out of this recipe, I added others, and I have had it for 50 years,” she adds.
Margarita has been in contact with the Home Help Service for five years. “I requested it for my mother, about five years ago, she died three years ago, and they accepted it. I suffered a lot from her taking care of her, part of what happens to me in her knee has to do with the effort I made with her. They came to bathe her, although I always helped, ”she details. “Later, help came to the dependency two months before he died,” she laments.
Now she is the user of this service. “I have a knee prosthesis and macular degeneration, which, fortunately, has stopped for the moment, and with home help I can start doing things at home,” she says.
He admits that this initiative has allowed him to share a little more with his surroundings, but he admits that he is “very lonely”. A situation that even appears in your medical history as if it were just another disease. To alleviate this situation, he attends the activities organized by the City Council, goes out for a walk, “and I have my Internet friends.”
Book
savoring memories is an editorial initiative that, through the Municipal Social Assistance Institute (IMAS) and Clece, the company that manages the Home Assistance Service in Santa Cruz, has resulted in a book that has allowed users to share recipes that they are part of their idiosyncrasy, of the ideology of good eating, dishes with which they have coexisted and with which everyone feels fully identified.
Of these recipe books, more than 1,500 copies will be distributed throughout Santa Cruz de Tenerife among the elderly and, therefore, among their families.
The mayor of Santa Cruz, José Manuel Bermúdez, considers that “it is an excellent initiative to carry out this publication with cooking recipes, prepared with the collaboration of users of the City Council’s Home Help Service (SAD)” and He adds that “it is a set of proposals for first and second courses, as well as traditional sweets and desserts, which recall and recall the smells and flavors of a lifetime; in short, a success that part of the concessionaire company of the service and the IMAS, which has been able to encourage the participation in its development to the users of home help”.
For the Councilor for Social Action, this type of initiative “serves to make the service less welfare and more personal. Last Christmas, the donation of books from some users to others was already carried out, and this new initiative with cooking recipes follows that line of making the service more human and close”.
The SAD in Santa Cruz has between 1,100 and 1,200 users. “We have a high demand, especially due to the long waiting times in the dependency,” explains González. “We resolve in about three months, however we see that people who turn to the Dependency Law, and find themselves waiting up to two years. The City Council is bearing the higher care burden than we should, ”he concludes.
