Abandoned Children Part I - Latin America

Carolina was born to a mother struggling desperately with a drug addiction. There seemed to be little hope for her future. Like 40 million other children in Latin America, she faced a life of abuse and possibly living on the streets. But now she is safe with me and my wife, safely part of our family. Let me tell you how that happened.

The life expectancy of a Latin American street child is only four years, and they usually succumb to hunger, drug addiction or violence. Yet fostering has never taken root as a solution to Latin America’s growing number of street children. Fostering a child can be expensive for parents struggling to care for their own children, and there are also many emotional issues that foster children bring with them, as a result of their previous family lives.

So we have to say to ourselves: what can the Church do? We cannot just sit by and watch this problem as if it has nothing to do with us. What is our part? And for us in Latin America, the answer to this question is Casa Viva!

Casa Viva is a fostering programme which works with local churches to find and support families who can take a child into their home. Casa Viva provides each family with training so they can know how to care for their new child, and the whole church commits to help the family and the child. This means that instead of an orphanage where they are just another mouth to feed, children are surrounded by the love and support of the Christian community and are able to truly belong to a family.

And what is my role to play? I too am part of the Church. My family decided it was right to join the Casa Viva programme. So back in 2006 that is what we did. My wife and I and our three children were all together receiving the training to begin to foster a child, when there was an emergency call. A small baby of just six days old was in the hospital all alone – her parents could not care for her and a family was needed to take her in. We were delighted to have this beautiful child in our family! It was supposed to be for just six months, and then it turned into a year. It became clear that Carolina’s parents would never be able to help her and bring her up, and so we were able to officially adopt her and make her a part of our family forever. God has truly blessed us with this wonderful daughter!

There are still many children who need to be loved like Carolina, who need to know what it is like to belong to somebody. So we are currently training 40 new churches to become part of this initiative, and the model has been so successful that it has been given government funding for use in Bolivia, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Peru.

One researcher interviewed street children around Latin America. She asked them simple questions: what makes you happy? What makes you sad? The most popular answer was this: “Not having a family makes me sad. I would be so happy if I had my family back.” Street kids may be tough and difficult to reach, but in the end they’re just children. And together we can help to give them exactly what my Carolina now has, what all children really need – a family.

~ Alfredo Mora-Rojas, Director of Viva Latin America

Learn more about Casa Viva at http://www.casaviva.org/