South Zone school pays tribute to women who went to war

Marta, Graciela, Mariana, Estela, Noemie, Olga, Doris, Perla and so on. Their names are not often heard among the tributes of the Veterans Day and the victims of the Falklands War. However, yesterday they were the center of the school act which featured teachers and seventh grade students from school No. 560 in Jujuy province, in the southern region of Rosario. "We wanted to remember the most forgotten stories in this story," said the teachers who, along with the boys, plunged into the life of these radio operators, nurses and surgical instructors who participated in the war.

This was not an act for the students of the Oroño Boulevard and Sanchez de Bustamante School, in the Las Delicias neighborhood. This is the exhibition of an entire work that began when their teachers of art education asked them what they knew about Malvinas.

From clbad work, "it appeared that they knew a lot about the war, there were comrades who had grandparents or veteran neighbors, it was not a question that was foreign to them, but that they had spoken at home, attention was paid to the youth of the soldiers, others saw an economic interest in the war, but none of them knew that there were women involved in the conflict ", recalls one of the teachers in charge of the event, Liliana Rocca.

Then came the proposal to investigate the lives of these women, about whom there is not much written, to get books, newspaper clippings and interviews with members of the former Rosario Fighters Center.

The names of Marta Beatriz Jiménez, Graciela Gerónimo, Mariana Soneira, Estela Carrión, Noemí Marchesotti, Olga Graciela Cáceres, Doris West, Perla Aguirre, Olga Elvira Grbado, Nelly De Vera , of Savid Molina, Susana Barr, were presented. , Maria Marta Lemme, Norma Navarro, Maria Cecilia Ricchieri and María Angélica Sendes.

Veterans often warn against the "desmalvinization" that followed the defeat of the Falklands war in 1982 and "condemned the veterans to silence and forgetfulness". Women had to wait for something more than the late 90s to receive their homage. Only in 2013, they received the Medal of Valor from the Ministry of Defense. Two years later, they began to parade and the parades were awarded only on June 22 of last year in the Senate of the nation.

In 2015, the book "Invisible Women" by Alicia Panero was presented. This book recreates the life stories of some of the women who participated in the Malvinas. In the prologue, it is noted that since 1982, more than 90 books have been written in English and about 30 in Spanish, "but none of them devotes a single chapter to women's actions, in their different roles" .

The result of this "institutional, political and social abandonment", he points out, of the more than 24,000 war veterans pensions paid by the state, there are no more than ten women beneficiaries in this category.

In the kitchen

"It's no coincidence that children who go to school do not know this part of the story," says Rocca, pointing out "the emotion that they expressed when they learned that just as there were veterans, they also existed. " The surprise also came when they learned the tasks that women developed during the war. "First of all, everyone thought of being responsible for housework, cook, for example," explains the professor.

Far from these tasks, veterans were responsible for communication tasks, such as those of the radio operators, and the responsibility for ensuring the health of the soldiers, as surgical instructors and nurses. Some were civilians of the armed forces and were working at the hospital in Puerto Argentino, others in the ARA Breaker "Almirante Irizar". They were all very young, between 19 and 25 years old, and some had arrived as volunteers.

"They were very brave," rescued Alan, one of the children who participated in the event. The names of the 17 women have been hanging on the walls of the clbadroom since yesterday.