street kids Archives - annabel smith

Within 48 hours of arriving in Guatemala I had learned more about justice, genocide and journalism than all my English education had taught me. You bet I was cheering last week when the former dictator was jailed for 80 years.

There was chaos in Guatemala City when I landed in July 2003 – streets crowded with demonstrators and traffic at a standstill. The radio in my hotel told me the crowds were supporters of Efrain Rios Montt – former President, military dictator and commander of the government forces responsible for the worst excesses of Guatemala’s thirty-six year civil war.

What? A man accused of genocide – why would anyone want him back?

Heading out of town I saw posters, slogans and flags of rival political parties festooned across streets and painted on the road. Buses roared past on their way to the city to register candidates for the upcoming local elections. Perhaps the same buses that had carried the angry mobs into the capital the day before?

In 2003 Guatemala was still off the main tourist track. Guide books made scant mention of the civil war and few people strayed into the indigenous communities that were targeted in the genocide. My guide Ruben showed me things I would have missed, like the small crosses scattered across the cemetery, marking the civil war graves. Many more bodies lay in unmarked mass graves, their location still secret 10 years after the end of war.

I asked Ruben if the war had been in his village. He said yes: his people had supported the rebels and so US-backed government forces had moved in with helicopters and small planes and carried out a scorched earth campaign. Unable to defeat the rebels, the army simply targeted the communities that sustained them. Witness testimonies record villagers being terrorized, raped, tortured and killed indiscriminately.

He came home from school one day to see a truck full of boys from his village being taken away. He ran. His friends were forced to join the army and become executioners of their own people.

When the peace accords were signed in 1994 two international commissions were established to investigate the truth of the struggle between successive military regimes and leftist guerillas. Both reports held government forces responsible for over 89% of the 200,000 deaths and 45,000 disappearances.

In 2003 the generals were still in prison, but not for much longer. I arrived just as many peoples’ worst fears seemed to be being realized and the past, in the form of Rios Montt, looked set to return.

When I asked Ruben about the demonstration in the capital he smiled patiently. They were paid. Most of the demonstrators did not even know why they were there. It was true, though, that in many rural areas, including those where the terror had been worst, Montt was the candidate of choice.

His political party, the Columbian drug cartel-funded FRG, was the only one that identified with the poor. Eight million Guatemalans lived in the countryside, 60% below the poverty line. Widespread illiteracy, no media and an almost passionate determination to bury the past meant that most people knew nothing of Montt’s history. What they did know was that he promised cheap fertiliser, free health care, new schools and land reform. None of the other parties even pretended to care about the poor. Of course the stakes were lower for them – without Presidential immunity, Montt knew that his crimes would catch up with him. As they did, last week.

I saw the poverty. Six and seven year old boys in orange wigs and face paint juggling fruit at intersections in hope of winning a few quetzales from hard-faced motorists who wound up their windows against them. Tiny children who made toys out of garbage; teenagers who risked their lives taking dares from passers-by. There were 6,000 children living on the streets of the capital in 2003 and persistent rumours that private security groups were hired to shoot them because they were bad for business.

I never ‘did’ Latin America, presumably because it was never ‘ours’. When I left school I could not even have found Guatemala on the map. Without time on the ground, Ruben, the writings of Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu and considerable research I would still have no idea why last week’s verdict was historic and monumental.

I also never once considered that the BBC could simply be wrong.

Before we give up on Broken Britain, here’s some inspiration from the girls of Loreto Day School in Kolkata. Over the last 30 years they’ve changed thousands of lives by turning their school into a multi-faith hub for social justice. They also passed all their exams. If they can do it, why can’t we?

In 1979 LDS Sealdah was a traditional girl’s Catholic school with a small group of scholarship students. This left the new Principal, Sister Cyril, ‘uneasy’, so she began to open the school up, to create a ‘healthy mix’. Now twice the size, half the pupils are from families so poor that the school not only buys their uniforms, food, medicines and books, but also pays their parents’ rent in the nearby slums.

Meanwhile, the girls daily passed hundreds of children who were living on the pavements and railway platforms with no hope of an education. So the girls began an amazing experiment, gradually drawing street children into an after school program of games and lessons. It was so successful that within a few years they had created a fully integrated school-within-a-school. The children became known as the Rainbows, a source of joy and also a revelation: with regular attendance, an illiterate ten or eleven year-old Rainbow can be ready to join a mainstream class of girls her age within a year.

Teaching the Rainbows is Work Education, a curricular subject which takes place twice a week. Girls are taught to teach literacy, numeracy, life skills and crafts, vital for survival and income generation.The huge top-floor room is filled with children, half in blue and white uniforms, half in ragamuffin cast-offs. All are intent on the lesson, holding up cards with sounds and letters, spelling out words, laughing and shouting encouragement. In a country still riven by the legacy of caste – where a high caste woman may work to support a low caste woman but not touch a cup of tea she has made – it’s an amazing sight.

Work Education can also be completed in local villages – 150 girls go on their day off every week to teach 3,500 rural children – with Childline, the Hidden Child Domestic Labour Project, or in the local slums. Girls regularly encounter cases of injustice and abuse and are challenged to get involved. They learn to use their voices and their skills, gathering evidence, lobbying and advocating for children’s rights.

Values Education is also compulsory, designed to make girls think and to promote social change. Together these two programs, equal in importance to the traditional subjects, make a curriculum of agency. This honestly recognises that the world outside the window is not ok and prepares young women to be part of the solution: Loreto graduates are confident, informed and dynamic.

The school survives from hand to mouth, on gifts and grants and prayers. It’s by no means perfect, Sister Cyril can be distinctly dictatorial and some of the education is old-fashioned and dull. But several very powerful myths have been exploded by these merry girls with blue hair ribbons: they have demonstrated beyond doubt that compassion is more productive than competition, and that doing the right thing is about love, not money.

London is not like Kolkata and many of Sister Cyril’s programs would be crushed by Health and Safety before the ink was dry. But across the UK things are not ok either. People are separated from one another by gulfs of inequality and unfamiliarity; children are abused, homeless, hungry and frightened. It’s time for our own radical vision. So let’s be inspired by the Rainbows and get started.