Understanding services for homeless children in Latin America
Anyone who has worked in an American soup kitchen or homeless shelter might find it difficult to recognize a program for street kids in Latin America. A program in Mexico insists, “we never give out food.” Several in Brazil have rejected the concept of shelters, working instead with families. In a small city in Argentina, work with “street kids” never even goes on the street. Perhaps most significantly, you’ll never hear words like “charity” or “social services.” The words you hear are “protagonismo,” (protagonism or agency) “sujeto social,” (the social actor) and “anti-asistencialista.” (anti-help-ism)
In order to understand how and why Latin American organizations have become so effective and efficient, one has to leave behind American and European ideas of “social work.”
Lamentably, the word “asistencialismo” has no equivalent in English. “Asistencia” is help, or aid. A traditional social worker is an “asistente social.” Asistencialismo is, literally, “help-ism.” In the rhetoric of the programs that work with street children, asistencialismo is the institutional sin par excellence. According to most program directors and line staff, direct help only builds dependence and allows kids to stay on the street.
American and European social service agencies emerged from the welfare state, or perhaps from the church, but in Latin America, these programs grew in the soil of revolution. Though few street educators have actually been revolutionaries, they are inspired by Che Guevara, by the Sandinistas and the FMLN, by the Tupumarus and Salvador Allende. Where Americans tell a story of the government’s responsibility to help poor people, Latin Americans insist on the people’s responsibility to seize justice for themselves. Because of this history, the discourse of the Latin American left often sounds like that of North American conservatives: it stresses responsibility and independence. It differs from the conservative discourse by instisting upon the collective responsibility of poor people and by emphasizing equality and justice over individual prosperity.
Often, the visionaries behind programs for street kids in Latin America have been steeped in philosophy and sociology, and the relationship between subject and object centers their view of the world. A carpenter is the subject, a chair his object. A writer is the subject, a book her object. According to the critique that Latin Americans make of US-style social work, the social worker becomes the subject and the poor person the object. The social worker does all the work, leaving the street kid with dinner, but without power, dignity, or the pride of a job well done.
These programs don’t want children to be objects of charity or pity. They want them to be subjects of their own destiny. In some cases, like Guatemala’s ADEJUC, Recife’s Pé no Chão, or Bogotá's Taller de Vida, this means being a political actor, protesting for human rights or even running for local office.
In other cases, children learn how to want new pleasures: the pleasure of music instead of the pleasure of drugs, the freedom of dance instead of the freedom of the streets. Projeto Axé’s efforts to “teach desire” have had an amazing impact, as have dance schools like Colegio del Cuerpo or Edisca, or circus schools like Circo Para Todos and Se Essa Rua Fosse Minha.
Sometimes, street kids become teachers, as at the FOC in Buenos Aires, or learn to health educators, as at Acción Educativa. Some of the best programs train girls to be sex educators for their peers, as at Transas do Corpo or De Joven a Joven, or to counsel their peers who have been raped and abused, as at Cecria. Others become economic actors, running a magazine at La Luciérnaga in Argentina, managing a catering company at El Caracol in Mexico, or creating a guitar workshop at Manaus’s OELA. In the case of Benposta, in Bogotá, a place that seems like a shelter is actually a democratic children's republic, dedicated to training community leaders.
In English, this vocabulary sounds stilted; subject and object, like existence and essence, are concepts we should have forgotten after that Sophomore year philosophy class. But in Spanish, this is the bread and butter of work with street kids: giving them the tools to become the protagonists of their own lives.
Please click on the following links to:
- Research the lives of children on the street and in the slums of Latin American cities
- Sort organizations by geographical location
- Find organizations that serve street children in a number of fields, from street education to community development and from gender issue to dance
- Read about the best practices Latin American NGOs
- See the ways in which Shine a light projects promote best practices and internacionalize local solutions.
- Research the conditions of life on the street in a dozen countries, and learn from the experiences of activists in those countries.
- Find researchers with experise in the fields that interest you.
To learn more about the experiences of street kids in the United States and Latin America, click here to read Shine a light director Kurt Shaw's collection of radio commentaries on youth homelessness.
