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We write this from Panama, where we are opening our programme for some
of the many poor children here - especially the Indigenous. We do this
with the support of our partners, Kinder Zon.
Latin America, as you may know, is unique in the world in the magnitude
of the divide separating its rich from its poor. In our work this means
there is a large quantity of children out of school because they must
work or else their parents are simply too poor to send them: they are
in need of help.
The tiny minority of the population which controls perhaps 80% of the
wealth in these countries tends to ignore the needs of the poor. There
is not much of a middle class.. The result is the only people prepared
to participate with us in helping their own poor children, (our band
of "national volunteers") are all paid volunteers - for they are
too poor to be able to give their time and services without receiving
something to sustain them. In the countries where we work there are
virtually no real volunteers. And therefore the spirit of volunteerism,
of giving freely what you have to help others would be missing in our
work if it were not for the many international volunteers who participate
with us. We really value your generous work.
More than two year's preparation has gone into laying the groundwork
for our new projects in Ecuador (where we spent the first part of April)
- and Panama, where we are presently opening our first school.. During
this time our programme in Peru, on which these new projects is based,
took five years to evolve into the present effective system of recruiting
and educating very poor children.
During these years we have demonstrated that the children we work with
are part of a several-million-strong population of at-risk children,
a population which is largely ignored [UNICEF, National Governments
and NGOs do not place them in any special demographic category - apart
from the erroneous category: "school-age children who are attending
school']. And we have, by trial and error, developed a pretty effective
system for making contact with these children and getting them permanently
into educational institutions. And now our little organization, being
too small to reach more than a fraction of the children in these circumstances
throughout Latin America, is embarking on a campaign to grab the attention
of national governments: and get them to make effective improvements
and changes which will encompass the children in our target demographic
group: will give them the opportunity they now lack.
We want to use our existing centres as demonstration projects to show
both that the children really do exist, and that there are relatively
simple educational solutions which will give them a chance to make a
life for themselves. For this reason we are eager to open our projects
in National Capitals (such as Panama City and Quito) and as we have
already done in Lima; and we will be adding a campaign aspect to our
work. We want the media and personal persuasion to facilitate our getting
Governments, NGOs and development agencies to start helping these children.
They certainly are not doing so now.
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