Safe Passage (Camino Seguro)

Safe Passage educates, feeds, and provides essential services for children (4-16) who live in Guatemala City’s Zona 7 and 3, the municipal dump and its outlying neighborhoods. Several thousand families live in the dump and survive by scavenging trash; many live in houses made of garbage. Safe Passage staff believe that infant mortality may be as high as 50% before the age of one, and few residents have running water (let alone potable water), medical care, or, quite frankly, anything. Safe Passage serves 325 of the neediest of these children with school preparation, help with homework, and vocational training (particularly carpentry). It provides meals for all children, case management (particularly relations with the 12 nearby schools), food for participating families, work with families, and play therapy.

The local parish provides space for Safe Passage (an abandoned church at the edge of the dump and the community hall at the local parish); the program has also been donated the use of another space for a day center. Volunteers, mostly gleaned from Antigua’s Spanish Schools, are essential to the functioning of the program, and there is also a small professional staff.

Safe Passage struggles particularly with the addiction of parents’ to glue and other drugs and relations with local schools, generally unwilling to enroll children from the dump -- fortunately, Safe Passage has made huge strides in this area in the last several years. Now, case workers do direct interventions in the homes of families, teaching them how better to manage their lives, their money, and the hygiene of the home. Camino Seguro has also made great strides in access to medical care for the children and for their families.

Over the last several years, Camino Seguro has also been able to open several residential shelters, three in Guatemala City and one in the nearby town of Antigua.

The American magazine The World and I wrote an article about Safe Passage in January of 2003. You can read it at http://www.worldandi.com/newhome/public/2003/january/lfpub2.asp

Safe Passage / Proyecto Camino Seguro
Calle Hermano Pedro 3B
ANTIGUA, GUATEMALA
Telephone / Fax: + (502) 832 - 0171
Email: caminoseguro@hotmail.com

Contacto: Barbara Davis
barbara@safepassage.org