In the hardest days of the 2001 crisis, when everything seemed to fall apart, something different began to grow among the rubble: the need to be close to each other. Not to look the other way. To sustain oneself, even among strangers.
In that tired and convulsed country our entity was born: Commit more. Not from comfort or from a perfect idea, but from the urgency and mix of different social sectors. Very different people met almost without intending to: businessmen, bankers, neighbors, ordinary citizens, even the now deceased Mario Sábato, the writer’s son. They were not united by an ideology, but by something simpler and more powerful: the decision to do something.
Thus, in San Blas, on the banks of the Reconquista River, in the Buenos Aires district of Bella Vista, where there used to be a garbage dump, another story began to arise, a hope. Where the landscape was hostile, we built the Rainbow Montessori Children’s House. A place that, little by little, stopped smelling of abandonment and was filled with voices, games, care. Then came the community center Tamborcitos, Retoños, and the daily work of feeding, containing and accompanying each boy and girl who crossed our doors.
Nothing was immediate. Everything was done with the hands of the neighborhood, with neighbors, with friends. With time, with effort and with a conviction that grew silently.
Today, however, the climate is different. It feels like a more anesthetized, more distant country. Empathy seems to have gone on hold. But we know that it didn’t disappear: it is there, waiting to get moving again.
And we need it.
Because sustaining what we build no longer depends only on will. Our doors, which for years were open to more than 250 children, today are at risk of closing. We already had to interrupt health spaces and Montessori education. And it hurts. It hurts because we know what it means for each family, for each child.
Still, we continue. We want to continue. Even if it is with the essentials: a plate of food, a space to play, to dance, to learn, to be.
Our logo shows two hands: one small, one holding it, and a heart. We always believed that we were the ones helping. Over time we understood something different: when we accompany a child, they are the ones who rescue us. They take us out of apathy, tiredness, anger. They remind us why all this matters.
But today it is not enough to remember.
We need concrete help. New hands. New contributions. People willing to get involved, regardless of differences, as at the beginning. Because without that support, what is still standing will not be able to sustain itself much longer.
We don’t want to close. But alone, we can no longer.
*Lawyer and president of the Compromerse + Foundation.
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by By Juan Manuel Casolati*
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