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As a part of SAL's ongoing collaboration with the Paraguayan government to reform poblic policy around children, we have worked with the Children's and Adolescents' Ministry to develop a film school for homeless, working, and indigenous children. The project continues as a part of the Ministry's ongoing work, after Shine a Light taught filmmaking to a group of 10 children in Januardy, 2009. You can see their first films, above.
Colaboration with the New Paraguayan Government
The last decade has seen a striking change in the history of Latin America. While most international attention has gone to the theatrical antics of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, much more significant political changes have been happening in municipal and state governments all over the continent. By bringing voters into budgeting decisions, creating civil society-government partnerships, and improving the accountability of governments to their people, Latin America has become radically more democratic.
Thanks to a legacy of misrule from the Stroessner dictatorship, Paraguay has long been considered the most corrupt country in Latin America, and one of the most corrupt in the world [www.tranparency.org has rankings for the last decade]. At the same time, it has been one of the most unequal countries in the world, where a small upper class drives Land Rovers through decrepit streets while the majority of the population starves. However, in 2008, the corrupt Paraguayan government fell as one of the last undemocratic dominoes on the continent.
Though Paraguay had the misfortune to live through more years of dictatorship and corruption than most Latin American countries, it also had the good fortune to come into its own after the successes of new government and constitutional programs in Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia. As such, it can implement the best possible model for its new government, and is now working with Brazilian experts to bring their “participatory budgeting” system to the country, and with educators in Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Perú to develop popular education as part of the formal school curriculum.
And when the new Paraguayan Children's Minister was appointed, the model she chose as the best practice to follow… was Shine a Light's. Not only did the Ministry invite us to Asunción to help them create new public policies for children, they created a sub-ministry of “Protagonismo Infantil,” exactly what we have been promoting for the last eight years. Clearly, this policy isn't just about Shine a Light: good NGOs around Paraguay have been working to promote the idea that children are actors on the world's stage for the last two decades. None the less, because Shine a Light has become a clearing-house and archive for knowledge and best practices about marginalized children, the government called on us to help them design their new policies.
Because the new Children's Minister has worked for many years with kids, she knew that the content of this advice had to follow form. That's a philosophical way of saying that we were invited to a nation congress of young activists, kids from 6-18 years old who had come to Asunción to give their own insights into government policies for children. There were street kids, children who work on the street, peasant boys and girls, indigenous children who came with the leaders of their tribes, and even children from comfortable middle-class families. For three days, we played games with them, invented theater pieces, painted and created art… all of it oriented toward creating a new relationship between government and children. Not one where the state “takes care of the poor things” or protects them from the dangers of the world, not even one where the adults in the employ of the state (teachers and social workers) educate kids so that they will be good citizens. No, the kids wanted to see the government as a partner, as an agency that would work with them as they changed their world.
Politics, an eight year old boy insisted, “is any activity in which people, using reflection and discussion, decide how we will live together.” And with that, the kids began to propose new ideas for how they could help people live together in new and democratic ways.
o Children who work on the street complained that the police beat them up, but instead of simply demanding “the government has to do something,” they suggested that they could organize themselves, come up with a lesson plan, and go to police stations to teach the police better ways to relate to street kids. The government wouldn't teach the cops: it would be a partner in creating a space where kids could teach.
o Other children were deeply worried about the environment, because kids on the street live in the middle of other people's trash and cars' exhaust. They proposed that the government create emissions regulations, but also talked about how they could pick up trash in their neighborhoods - and in the process, teach their neighbors about how to care for the environment.
o Fed up with the rote-learning style of education in public schools, the kids proposed a series of reforms in which they could be researchers, investigating their world and then teaching their peers about politics, history, and science.
I could go on for pages: the kids' insight into their world and they ideas of democracy would shame most university political science classes.
At the end of the event, the president himself came to meet with the kids. We have come to accept that idea that the president speaks and the rest of us listen, but the kids reverse the dynamic. Leidy (10 years old) and Raquel (17 years old) presented the deliberations of the kids, and then handed the president a written report of what they expected from his administration. He listened carefully, read the ideas, and declared that, in fact, they would serve as the basis for his policies for children… and that on August 16, he would return to meet with the children to give a progress report. Finally, in a brilliant act of political theater the kids had invented, they finger-painted with the president.
The reader should ask at the moment, and quite rightly, “That's great, but what does Shine a Light have to do with that? These are the kids' proposals, not yours.” But that is exactly the point. Unlike a business or political consultant, we don't come in with a set of ready-made solutions. Instead, we show different ways that children can be actors on the world's stage. It isn't the content that matters, but the form. And in that way, Paraguay has suddenly become one of the most democratic countries in the world for children.
Over the next year, Shine a Light will also work with the Paraguayan Children's Ministry and several local NGOs to train a group of street child filmmakers, based on the success of the film collectives we helped to create in Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina. We will also be helping to organize a new music festival in Asunción, where marginalized child artists from all over Latin America can come and perform. The point, however, is a much broader one: the Paraguayan government has created a new way of relating to children, not seeing them as an “it” or a “they,” an object for which one can care, but as a “you”, people with whom it must dialogue in order to build a better world together.
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