El Caracol ("The Snail")
El Caracol works on the street, in various work environments, and in a transitional living program with street youth from 15-23, an age generally ignored by Mexican organizations that work with street kids. The program is based on a model of harm reduction, self-sufficiency, and a Wittgensteinian conception of play. By focussing on quality more than quantity, they have have spectacular results with many adolescents, some of whom now own their own businesses, newspapers, etc.
Street education forms the first tier of El Caracol's work. They do not understand street education as "outreach" or an attempt to draw youth into the more intense aspects of El Caracol"s programs; instead, street education is an end in itself. Street educators do not give food or condoms; they do not even identify themselves as being from an institution. They build relationships with the youth based on trust, listening, and empathy (the educators are extraordinarily capable), then begin a slow process of diagnosing a group's needs and capabilities through the use of art; a picture might ask "how do you live" and show comical drawings of kids sleeping on the street, urinating on the wall, stealing food, begging, etc. They have found that adolecents respond very well to this stimuli. Street educators also distrubute clever and beautiful comic books about life on the street.
Street educators have found that youth on the streets have both financial and intellectual resources. Many make a substancial amount of money as fakirs, beggars, and squeegee-men, and their social groups provide support. For instance, El Caracol believes youth should get into the habit of buying condoms, so they do not simply give them away; instead, when a youth shows that he has bought one condom, educators give him several more. Educators attempt to show youth how they can use their own resources to get off the street -- whether just for one night in a hotel or for their whole life.
In addition, El Caracol's street education team does more direct educational work. Once they have gained the trust of a group of youths, they take a computer, projector, and Power-Point presentation to their baldíos (hangout) and show artistic, funny, and well developed programs on AIDS, drugs, etc. Having learned that youth addicted to glue learn in peculiar ways, they do safe-sex presentations in the place where they have sex, drug presentations where they get high, etc. Since educators have also learned that toluene (in the form of activo, a PVC cleaner) seems to destroy the aural cortex before the visual, they emphasize pictures and art. The presentations were developed out of focus groups with street kids.
El Caracol runs several businesses in which street youth work as interns and apprentices. These include a very successful restaurant (Las Tortugas Locas), a catering company which provides food for state dinners at several embassies (including France!), an offset printing shop, a farm to raise rabbits for food, and a bakery. All of these businesses are self-sustaining and train a large number of youth to work in a completely professional setting or begin their own business. Many youth refer to their time as the Caracol MBA ("El Tec de Caracol").
El Caracol also runs a transitional living program, distinguished by the level of freedom and responsibility it provides for the youth. Here, staff work carefully on the construction of identity, trying to help youth lose the self-definition as a "street kid."
El Caracol believes that the "professionalization of the street" and dependence on institutions have made it more difficult for street youth to array their resources toward getting off the street, so they put a lot of time into outreach toward other institutions. They also believe in a deeply professional attitude toward work on the street, which means commitment, ethics, and harsh self-criticism. This self-criticism has taken its most concrete form in their monitoring process, where El Caracol constantly evaluates and changes its own work.
Funds from foreign governments, help from local businesses, and their own businesses fund El Caracol. They would like to become completely self-sufficient.
Shine a light is collaborating with El Caracol to distribute their street education curriculum in the Street Education Health Project.
Contacto: Martín Pérez García (Director)
info@elcaracol.org
www.elcaracol.org
+52 55 5768 1204, +52 55 5764 2121
Heliodoro Valle No. 337
Col. Lorenzo Boturini
CP 15820 México, DF
México
