Paul Myhill's Blog

Community Solutions (part three)

What’s more, these children aren’t even considered part of a community in many cases. The global trend in urbanization has brought millions of people into the cities from rural areas. The "it takes a village to raise a child" mentality in Africa, and other parts of the developing world, is being shattered.

What village?

Cities are now mass agglomerations of different tribal groups and village backgrounds. When the parents die, the children often don’t know where they originally came from and there’s often no extended family around to take them in.

The presenter was right about one thing, though. Institutionalization is not the answer. We abhor it at World Orphans and I abhor it personally. I told this presenter as much afterwards.

World Orphans is involved in the full spectrum of orphan rescue and care, from prevention to integration into families to transition programs for formally institutionalized children. This is all done through local indigenous churches.

So, maybe we need to clarify and equate terms. I will argue that a church-based solution is the community-based solution.

If needed, putting children into church families is synonymous with putting them into community families. It’s the same thing. The church is either the center of the village or the new "village" that can help to raise a child.

The difference is that the Church has the infrastructure, staff and compassion, to make community-based solutions a successful reality. The church is the screening and monitoring mechanism. The church is the rescue and care mechanism. The church is part of the community, fully integrated into the community. They know the families. They know the kids.

...And the church has the moral fiber and accountability structures to ensure children aren’t being taken in to be used, abused, or exploited.

To be continued...

Community Solutions (part two)

I’ve also seen plenty of cases where the placement of orphaned children into community families brought about the same scenarios of abuse and exploitation that the presenter attributed to institutions. Children being used as sex slaves. Children being used as domestic help or as wage-earners for these families.

Without the necessary screening and monitoring structures, many ‘community solutions’ are akin to the Hail Mary pass, throwing up the ball for grabs and hoping for a successful completion. To just state that community child placement is the solution, without having all the infrastructure in place to make it work, is an oversimplified picture, an erection of an obvious straw man that damages the perception and acceptance of ‘other’ orphan care scenarios.

Who is going to screen the families according to their ability and intent? Who is going to make sure that families aren’t just leaving the children to fend on the streets? Who is going to ensure that these families aren’t trafficking the children or using them for illicit purposes?

To simply say that children are ‘in families’ or that ‘community families’ should simply absorb them is to be ignorant of or to ignore the cultural issues and fallen human nature that serve to enslave or neglect these children.

If I were to tell you that we need to solve our impending Social Security crunch by having more people paying in and less people drawing out, you’d tell me that was pretty darn obvious, right? The reality is that the numbers don’t add up and there are many other factors involved that make that suggestion an absurd one.

Likewise, to say that we simply need to see these millions of orphans placed in community families is unrealistic and unattainable. It is devoid of the cultural taboo issues concerning adoption or foster care in many countries. It is devoid of the limited capacity considerations of many countries that already have families caring for multiple children in addition to their own. And it is devoid of the understanding of sinful human nature to use others to forward your own objectives and desires.

To be continued...

Community Solutions (part one)

One presenter at the last Global Summit on AIDS and the Church offered slides that stated:

"90% of orphans in Africa are already living in families"

"It is a myth that there are not enough families for these children."

This particular presenter then launched an attack on group residential care models, not differentiating between family-style homes (our model) and institutions, and summarized that we simply need family and community-based solutions. (Duh!)

Well...

Fragmented facts and overgeneralizations can be a dangerous thing, especially when over a hundred million lives (and eternities) are at stake.

The capacity and placement numbers are exceptionally deceptive. A surviving parent is often extremely sick and dying themselves, is impoverished as the principal wage earner has died, has been disenfranchised and kicked out on the streets, or is working multiple jobs to survive. Many turn to drugs and prostitution.

The children aren’t in school. They aren’t receiving love and attention. They are on the streets.

Where no parents survive, extended and community families often become the next alternative. However, many of these families are ill-equipped to take in additional mouths to feed. The children, although officially listed in statistics as "being in a family," are in reality left to their own devices.

They effectively went from being orphaned, to being abandoned and ignored.

The evidence is everywhere, in the form of millions of children (supposedly in families) that are living, bleeding and dying on the streets.

To be continued...

Broken Heart

It was a million dollar view. The wooded property on a hillside overlooks Guatemala City. Volcanoes dot the horizon and add further majesty to the scene. One would expect the rich of society to be dwelling on such a plot. A mansion could have suitably left its footprint on the land, nestled in comfort and grandiosity. Grecian columns would have matched the noble girth of trees. Rock gardens and ponds would have complimented natural terraces of foliage and sloping outcroppings. It would have been a fine estate, one of enduring legacy, one fit for a national leader or captain of industry.

Instead, a stark and underfunded Catholic orphanage sits on the land. Manicured lawns have given way to bare dirt. Grand vistas and pools of leisure have given way to makeshift playground equipment of old tires, splintered wood and rusty rebar.

The children, covered in dirt and dust, looked every bit the orphan, although they were officially part of the rescued statistics. Scabs and sores bore further evidence to ongoing lack and need.

And then there was the little boy, the one without a name.

He was purple. He has a heart problem that prevents his extremities from getting adequate oxygenation. Is he still alive even today, a week after our visit? He’s just another boy in institutional care with an issue that his caretakers are poorly equipped or resourced to solve.

The thing that struck me is that this boy, discarded for being damaged or incomplete, is worth much more than any regal manor or stately home. The things of greatest value are already occupying this prime piece of property. They are the land’s greatest heritage, its greatest legacy.

Instead of investing hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop the property with an architectural statement for the generations, isn’t it worth a couple of thousand dollars to leave a more lasting generational impact...to fix one little boy’s heart?

Pop-Pop-Pop

We had just turned in for the evening. The four of us were sharing a dorm room in a seminary within walking distance from the city dump. The surrounding neighborhoods were cordoned off by concrete barricades, presumably to prevent unknowing persons from driving into the wrong area and to hinder the escape of vehicles involved in drive-by shootings. We were told that even the police dared not go into some of these communities.

Pop-pop-pop. The sound was close and distinctive. Unlike the resonance of small explosions that most Hollywood sound editors use, the blast of real gunfire is one of staccato echoes piercing the quiet. Pop-pop-pop-pop.

Minutes later we heard the sirens, followed by a rapid volley of shots. As quickly as it began, it was over.

Guatemala’s three-decade civil war fostered a culture of violence and left almost 200,000 people dead. By most accounts, that many juveniles are now part of vicious street gangs, causing the country to be one of the most violent in the world. The homicide rate is astronomically high, almost ten times that of the United States.

Three people were killed in our neighborhood during our short stay in Guatemala City. The week before our arrival, a shootout in the housing development next to one of our church projects resulted in the death of four gang members who had kidnapped a six year-old girl for ransom. Days prior, they had invaded her home, murdered her parents, and were demanding money from the extended family. Multiple drivers were also executed on their routes while we were in the country. In response to bus companies’ failure to pay protection money for driving through gang territories, the drivers are routinely killed by these wayward youth, to the tune of dozens of deaths each year.

In this decade after the civil war, Guatemala remains a country beset by savagery and unrest, this time at the hands of fatherless youth – either orphaned or effectively so because of absent fathers.

The Chain (part two)

Jullio was brought to his current home by a woman claiming to be his mother. She signed a document asserting that she was abandoning him to their care due to extreme poverty and an inability to care for an impaired child. The home soon figured out that the woman was not who she claimed to be and that Julio was, in effect, dumped into their care as a result of a trafficking deal gone bad.

Born for cash, Julio now inhabits this world as a child struggling for identity and answers. This apparently triggers anger to well up in him, causing difficulty for the home and for the other children who are now part of his family. Those children receive less attention and care as the family devotes additional time and energy to address Julio’s special needs.

It is indeed a chain – a wicked one where every link tugs and pulls at others. Despite much love and counseling Julio may never feel whole. And the home’s other children, rightly or wrongly, may never feel that they got the attention they deserved because of his presence.

Lives are not things to be tinkered with. And they’re certainly not to be initiated for trade. Perhaps Julio’s mother rationalized her actions by believing that he would be raised in a wealthy American home. Maybe she figured that he would cast an unseen legacy, as a child that would find knowledge and prosperity that greatly surpasses her own.

She got it wrong...to a degree.

If not for the church, Julio might have been sold as a slave laborer or, far worse, as a sex toy for a rich Guatemalan pedophile. He could have just as easily been left on the pavement, like other children we have encountered throughout Central America. As a street child with a disability, Julio would have left a far worse legacy that his mother could have ever imagined. Her baby boy, the fruit of her womb, would have suffered abuse upon abuse...while the money in her pocket had long since vanished.

The Chain (part one)

Although we were told he has violent tendencies, Julio presented himself as a jovial and pleasant young boy. He stroked and tugged at my arm while continuously begging to have his picture taken. His broad smile was comprised of a mouthful of crooked teeth framed by parenthetical dimples. Just eight years old, he lives with fourteen other children at a church home we funded a few years ago near Guatemala City.

Julio was bred for a business transaction. His mother received money to get pregnant on the condition that she would turn over the newborn to a crime ring that specialized in sourcing children for international adoption. Sometimes these women collaborated with their boyfriends or husbands. Sometimes they were prostitutes that used unprotected sex to score a bigger payday. And sometimes they were conveniently impregnated by members of the crime syndicates. In all cases, poverty drove their decision to turn womb from incubator to factory.

As agreed, Julio’s mother relinquished her infant to an intermediary that would temporarily raise him before his sale to a home for ‘orphaned and abandoned’ children. There he would stay until a lucrative adoption could be arranged.

Julio’s intermediary owners soon began to suspect that he might have some sort of disability. Once confirmed, they were unable to pass him down the supply chain. The final organization wouldn’t take him. He was damaged goods with a no-return policy.

Children of the Dump (part two)

During that first visit, children younger than six were working either independently or alongside their families to scratch morsels out of crumpled cans and cups, constantly beating off the competition of macro and micro-winged pests. Shacks made of rusty razor-edged tin, warped boards, and ripped tarps dotted the landscape of fermenting garbage mounds and craters. The children were covered in filth; it was etched into their skins and psyches. Ragged t-shirts and sweatpants were mere excuses for threads to suspend grime from gaunt bodies. Fibers were saturated with fetid sauces, drippings and smears. Little feet, often bare or inserted into dilapidated shoes or flip-flops, squished and crunched across mounds of multi-colored options and impediments. Each step could yield either treasures or treachery.

This was no place for a child. This was no life for a child.

Very few families and homeless kids live in the Guatemala City dump now. A giant landslide of refuse took dozens of lives. Eighteen bodies were never found, left to decompose within the piles they once plied. A fifty-foot wall of tumbling trash served as both executioner and embalmer. Now, rag-picker homesteads have been moved to the outskirts and curious missionaries like me have to observe from surrounding outcroppings and waste-strewn hills.

Children of the Dump (part one)

The graveyard is at least ten city blocks long and five or six city blocks wide. Mausoleum after mausoleum lines a grid work of streets that cut through the expansive cemetery of above-ground tombs. Most of the crypts are very elaborate, reminding me of latter-day versions of the carved sarcophagi in the necropolis of Hierapolis, Turkey, where the Apostle Philip was executed. These more recent vestiges do indeed show wear and tear themselves from the battering of tropical storms and the chiseling of homeless day laborers who find shelter and employment in the sprawling city of the dead.

People of lesser means are laid in multistory sepulchers adorned with colorful epitaphs and creeping plants. Some of these stacked vaults have been bashed in, and the remains removed, due to families’ inability to pay the regular maintenance fee. Rusty metal barrels ominously sit next to open graves, presumably to transport the former occupants to no-rent areas…or perhaps to the adjoining dump.

Large black vultures circle the edges of the cemetery, marking the boundary where interred trash merges with interred bodies. I stood on an outcropping, a place where these filthy beasts roosted on monochromatic crypts devoid of pomp and circumstance. A scene out of an Agatha Christie movie, swarms of birds perched on dead trees and equally-dead tombs while their brothers and cousins filled the air with the constant whooshing and whomping of large wings in motion. The morbid foreground panorama is placed against a background of trash and slums that reach to the horizon.

The stench of wet vulture droppings is mixed with the stomach-wrenching odor of decaying waste, hauled in by a continual line of trucks weaving in from the city’s compacted neighborhoods of three million residents.

Some of those residents were directly below us, sifting through the fresh refuse swarming with maggots and flies, looking for items of perceived value and sorting recyclables into piles of future subsistence income.

The last time I was in the Guatemala City dump was quite a few years ago, but just a few years removed from the country’s thirty-six year civil war, the longest in the Americas I’m told. Tensions were still high and wounds were still raw. The images of families working through piles of waste, in a country where many people had been laid waste, were disconcerting, to say the least.

To be continued...