Hope for Colombia's lost children

[AlphaCentauri]

A maze of dirty roads lined with windowless nightclubs, scores of prostitutes wearing neon-coloured tops and fishnet tights, and homeless men covered in thick, wool blankets scraping by - just off Bogota's notorious Avenue Caracas, another day has begun.

Stephania, 12, lives here with her mother, a prostitute. Their home is a former brothel, their bedroom is one quarter of an old bathroom, their bed takes the place of the ripped out bathtub.

Once a prosperous commercial area of Colombia's capital, the past two decades have seen the avenue fall into disrepair.

Victims of poverty and growing national inequality, Stephania and her mother migrated to the street from Medellin, Colombia's second city, for work.

Stephania has never met her father, who is wanted by the police for murder.

Her mother has chronic depression. One day she treats Stephania kindly, on another she will beat her. What is regular is for her mother to arrive home and tell her daughter details of her work.

Little help

There are few people willing to help Stephania and the other children living on and around the streets of Colombia - they are a social group typically stigmatised, marginalised and at times persecuted.

But some non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as Foundation Ninos de los Andes and Fundacion Renacer in Bogota and Fundamor in the cities of Cali and Bogota, provide emergency care, meals, education, psychologists and counselling for between tens to hundreds of youngsters.

The Foundation Ninos de los Andes patrols the area where Stephania lives to find vulnerable children and offer them day care and refuge at their centre off Avenue Caracas, itself one floor of a former bar and prostitutes' living quarters.

The organisation has four centres around the capital and one on its outskirts for children left on the streets, in danger or with a drug habit.

Without the centre, Stephania would be left alone during the day, or would stay with two other girls, both daughters of prostitutes.

Maryibe Jalero Cardona, a social worker at the centre, says that there are three main dangers for Stephania.

"The constant contact with prostitutes and their world means that daughters can think that it is normal and follow it," she says.

"The room Stephania and her mother live in is rented by the night, so they could easily be chucked out if they don't pay. Stephania may think that she could work as a prostitute if they just need the money for one night's rent."

The second danger is that drug use is widespread in the area - whether cocaine, marijuana or ecstasy.

The third is abuse by any of the significant number of men trawling the streets for prostitutes day and night.

Sewer children

In the 1970s and 1980s, as Colombia's internal conflict raged, street children were often killed by paramilitary "death squads" and police officers acting as vigilantes.

The children became known as "los desechables" (the disposables) - a name still used by some people today.

For protection, street children fled to live on ledges in the city's labyrinth of sewers.

Here they risked drowning by flooding sewage, death from disease, or on a few occasions, incineration by petrol bombs thrown into the sewers by the "death squads".

Eventually, some individuals attempted to provide aid for the children.

In 1973 Jaime Jaramillo, an oil executive from Bogota, started to wade through the sewers to rescue these children if they wanted assistance, acting despite the noxious conditions - often using scuba-diving gear with an oxygen supply.

He created the Foundation Ninos de los Andes in 1988, helping to remove all the children from the sewers.

And in the 1990s, the government in turn began to prosecute police officers and death squads accused of killing street children.

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2008/12/200812213421095100.html