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Reaching Children on the Street
By Kenneth MacHarg
Former LAM Missionary
Americo was kicked out of his home when he was seven and wandered for over five years from town to town, up and down the jungle rivers of Peru. In and out of jail, he lived on the streets and kept moving.
Eventually Javier Villacis Fajado, the director of a shelter for street children, invited him to a camp. Each boy was invited to take a stick from a pile of wood and throw it into an evening campfire as a sign of whatever burden he wanted to discard.
Billy Clark, an LAM missionary who grew up in Peru says, “Americo picked up the whole stack and, breaking down into tears, threw all of them into the fire. A few days later, you could see the change in his face.”
There are an estimated forty million children working or living on the streets of Latin America. These children eke out a living by begging, washing cars, selling candy and gum, carrying groceries, shining shoes and often turning to petty thievery or prostitution.
“The boys live in the marginal areas of Iquitos, mostly with single moms,” says Javier. “The mothers work in the market and are poor, so they do not have any money to put them into school or to feed them. The first to go is the oldest boy. The girls are kept until the situation worsens. Many of the girls end up in prostitution or at best as maids.”
“You can spot a street boy a mile away,” Billy reflects. “You can see their ragged clothing at a distance, they haven’t bathed in a month or two so they smell, and their teeth are bad.” But, Billy says that the most telling sign is “the look in their eyes. They have a complete lack of trust and self esteem.”
In many cases, child workers inhabit a much darker world of prostitution, drugs or violence. In El Salvador, for example, human rights groups estimate that 800 underage girls work in brothels. And in Brazil, almost 70 percent of deaths among children are blamed on street violence.
Missionaries who work with street children report that most of them (75 percent) have some family links, but spend most of their lives on the streets. Many never go beyond a fourth-grade education. The remaining 25 percent live in the streets, often in a group of other children. They sleep in abandoned buildings, under bridges, in doorways or in public parks.
“If you don’t have some place to channel them, you lose them back to the streets,” says LAM missionary Sue Leak who has worked with girls from the street in Morelia, Mexico. “You lose them to drugs and prostitution and the addiction of relationships that are not good for them.”
Violence is at the root of many children seeking shelter in the streets. “Six million children and adolescents are subjected to physical violence each year in Latin America,” says Alfredo Mora, a Costa Rican who is the Latin American director of Viva Network, a British-based Protestant umbrella organization working with children-at-risk. “In addition, 80,000 children worldwide die each year from various forms of violence in their own homes,” he says.
Violence is also a part of life on the street. Christian workers in Mexico City report that within two weeks of a girl living on the street she is violently raped by the police.
The struggle to leave the streets
“When I first met Daniel, he was aggressive, rude and had a filthy vocabulary,” says Nicole George, an LAM missionary working in Medellin, Colombia. “One day he became upset with me because I disciplined him and he threatened to stab me. Due to suffering and mistreatment on the streets, often by adults, it can be hard for a street kid to respect an authority or obey any rules—even if it is for his own good. However, the Lord was working greatly in the life of Daniel.”
“In 2007, Daniel moved to the boys’ farm. It was not easy for him in the beginning, especially as he was going through detoxification from drugs,” Nicole remembers. “However, he persevered, and now he is one of the best students in his class. More importantly, he has accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. He likes to pray and read the Bible and says that he would like to study theology.”
Children who have suffered so much that they choose to live on the streets over staying in an abusive situation have special needs and are difficult to reach. “Most street kids I know are very wealthy,” Sue Leak observes. “They just don’t know how to manage money. They will buy 30 ice cream cones in one day. They don’t really need physical things; they want someone to care and to be committed to them.”
At the center of street children’s struggle is a lack of trust according to Thomas Smoak, a missionary with Action International who works at a Christian children’s center in Sao Paulo, Brazil. “In every case, the trust relationship between the child and the parents has been broken. Street kids need a trusting, committed relationship to get their lives back together.”
Risks
“The hardest addiction for the kids to overcome is mistaking sex for love,” Sue explains. “They’re involved in prostitution. They go through a feeling of being unloved and uncared for.”
The family is the key to getting a child permanently off the street Thomas Smoak says. “The lack of a father figure is usually the main reason a child is working or living on the streets. Either the father is absent, in prison, or he is addicted to drugs or alcohol and turns violent.”
Private agencies are at the forefront of efforts to reach street kids. “We know that there are between 20,000 and 25,000 (Protestant) program sites across the world reaching about two million children in residential care,” explains Patrick McDonald, president of Viva Network. “There are another 20 million children in partial care, in slum programs, inoculation projects, after school care and so forth.”
Church involvement with troubled children “is probably larger than any other body,” he says. “UNICEF has a budget of a billion dollars a year. The Christian child care response is three times that, but its work is mostly unknown.”
Emphasizing the need to help children at risk, Patrick reflects, “Over three-billion children will be born in the next 25 years. The way we reach those kids will dictate what the next generation will look like. Whatever wins their affection and allegiance, and something will, is going to determine the shape of the world.”
Working with street children affects the lives of those who strive to help.
“Sometimes when I am walking around downtown and see so many children on the streets with empty looks in their eyes and sniffing their bags of shoe glue, I am filled with sadness as I ponder the horrible suffering and injustice all around me,” says Nicole. “Why is a child forced to sell candy on the streets rather than being given the opportunity to study? How can a mother permit a step-father to rape her daughter and not do anything about it? How can a father beat his own child? How can a mother send her daughter to have sexual relations in order to bring in an income?
“Sometimes I feel helpless and wonder if we can truly make any real difference with our work here. But then I think about boys like Daniel who have been able to leave behind the life of the streets and drugs and are now doing so well, and I remember that there is indeed hope for these kids. The Lord is good, loving and powerful, and through Him these precious lives can be redeemed.”
