The Children of Camino Seguro

This Monday actually felt like a Monday. It´s because I´m working. Volunteering, yes, but working all the same.

I started at Safe Passage (Camino Seguro) on November 3rd, but I haven´t had time to write about it since then because we work long days (on the bus at 7 am and off it again at 6 pm). Also, because I am trying to formulate exactly what I want to say about the experience.

Camino Seguro is a place for some of Guatemala City´s poorest children to come for food and love. While they´re there, they also get help with school, the chance to play lacrosse and go swimming, and do other things that kids like to do, like create art projects, science experiments, watch movies, and play games on the computers.

When I first started, it seemed like the kids were normal kids--they hang out with their friends, laugh, joke, sometimes misbehave, etc. But these kids are a little bit different. They live adjacent to the city dump--the largest in Central America--and that is where their parents and neighbors work every day, jumping on the piles of freshly collected garbage in search of treasures to recycle or resell. The kids used to work there, too, and some of them probably still spend some of their weekends there, collecting cardboard or aluminum cans.

One mother of some of our kids told a coworker recently that she worked for 11 hours in the dump a couple of weeks ago. When she went to sell the items she had collected, she ended up with a net of 7 Quetzales, not quite $1 US, for a whole day´s work.

So, at Camino Seguro we are trying to break the cycle of poverty that surrounds life near the dump. The project has three arms--a Guarderia for pre-school aged children, the main school reinforcement site for elementary-high school aged kids, and an Adult Literacy Program where some of the mothers of the children learn to read and write, up to a 6th grade level. I help teach English at the main school, and I am working with the coordinator there to re-organize the office and teaching resources before the new year begins. Check out this great YouTube video of some of our students! It´s about 8.5 minutes long, but they say everything a lot better than I can in writing this! (And the whole video was made by one of the school´s volunteers, too.)

In addition to the extracurricular activities and tutoring help, Camino Seguro provides scholarships for all of the items the kids need to attend school--uniforms, school supplies, etc. And the families of the kids enrolled at Camino Seguro receive food and clothing supplies to compensate for the income lost because the kids are not working to help support their families.

I did visit the dump. It is hard to describe--immense, gaping, hot, and swarming with vultures. A couple of months before I was there, a huge landslide of trash collapsed because of a methane gas build-up beneath it. No one knows exactly how many people were buried.

So, some days I have to remind myself when I am filing papers and coaxing 14-year-olds to say, ¨She is studying,¨ that it is important work.

I would say more but it´s about bedtime.