October 04, 2006
El Hogar takes in girls!
Whenever I talk about El Hogar, I have to explain why it is a "boys school." Sure, getting boys off the street is great - but what about the girls? The history is pretty straightforward. El Hogar was started in 1979, by some North Americans who were walking the streets of Tegucigalpa and their hearts were breaking. They saw many, many children living on the street, digging "food" out of dumpsters, sleeping under cardboard by themselves, and often wearing nothing at all.
Almost all of them were boys. The reasons for this are complicated and not really well understood. The bottom line is that when the family's resources got to the "nobody-in-the-world-should-ever-have-to-make-such-a-horrible-decision" point where somebody had to be put out so others could eat, it was the little boys who went. Theories for this center around the Latin culture that males need to take care of themselves. Also, mothers of these children tended to hold domestic service jobs and while it was fine to bring your daughter to help, it was unseemly to bring your little boy.
Boys are also more susceptable to being recruited by gangs at an early age, and it seemed urgent to get an alternative up and running.
I find none of these explanations entirely satisfactory myself, but the bottom line is that abandoned little boys (we're talking really little, here - 6, 5, even 4 years old) outnumber the girls by a wide enough margin that it seemed a good idea to build a boys school.
Nevertheless, as studies have unswervingly shown, if you want to make lasting social change in a culture, you have to start with the girls. They become heads of household in places like Honduras. They raise the next generation children. Feeding and educating them gives them the tools to raise heathy, productive people.
So, it was with great pleasure that at Jesus' house yesterday (see previous entry) we saw the first girl's application accepted to El Hogar.
