Graduations at Bruce Argentina
Children's Centres, August 2004
 
Our centres are meant to be the first way station for poor children enroute to an education and hopefully a productive life. When children are in school and launched into a life with new opportunities; we graduate them: to make room for new children who want a better life. Graduation does not mean the end of our relationship with the children we help. In fact it usually comes a lot
Graduation means separation for the children from people who may be the only adults who have ever shown them unconditional love. And for the volunteers it means saying good bye to children they have loved like their very own. We do our best to make it a time of celebration and recognition of accomplishment; but there are lots of forced smiles on both sides: and many wet eyes. Note: We are working on getting our own school license, which would open the door to our being able to create Homework Clubs in the schools where our graduated children attend - it would be open to our children and any others in the school who wanted to attend. It would mean that our graduated children could maintain contact with the love and support of our international volunteers, who would run the clubs along with a volunteer teacher(s) from the participating local school. closer to the beginning of our relationship with them than the end, for our social workers will continue to monitor and help each of our children all the way through his or her educational career.
But December is coming - when all children who will enter school next year must be registered - and we give ourselves quotas of how many children each of our centres will find, persuade, prepare and register by the December deadline. For this reason we graduated many of our children already in school, to make way for the children we are beating the backstreets and hedgerows to find. The reasons the children we are looking for are not in school are three: extreme poverty, abusive parents or abandonment.
To fulfill our mission, of getting as many children as we can - who have no chance at all of becoming educated if we don't get to them - into school; we must constantly fight against the temptation of becoming paternalistic: holding on to the lovable children we already have rather than graduating them and bring in new children, who need the same. Sometimes we lose volunteers over this, are often criticized. But the number of extremely poor, abused, forgotten, undernourished and uneducated little children is so staggering: we really must stick to our plan.