Viva - Together for Children

VIVA BLOG SITE HAS MOVED TO blog.viva.org

2011-05-19T17:31:00.000+01:00

Dear Viva fans, supporters, employees and any Viva - Together for Children blog followers.

Following the recent launch of our new website our blog has now also moved to a different site. If you would like to carry on reading inspiring, informative and educational articles on Viva and our work with children at risk you will find them either linked in on our new website at www.viva.org or head directly to our all new, dazzling blog site at blog.viva.org We will obviously still be posting links on our facebook page.

Thankyou and please do continue to read our stories! We look forward to seeing you there!

Love and blessings,

The Viva Communications Team.

Girl saved from trafficking in Nepal.

2011-04-28T14:24:00.001+01:00

“Look! This is what’s going on around you! This is the problem – fact! Open your eyes to the needs of your children!” This is what one group of 5 Christian leaders heard when they recently attended a Viva partners meeting in the small Nepalese town of Nuwakot.

“We want to help” the five leaders proclaimed to Viva network staff. “We truly do, but we don’t know how! We see this problem everyday here in Nuwakot. Women and girls treated as if they were nothing, being abused as if it were the God-given right of their “possessors”. Desperate girls have turned up on our doorstep pleading for help as they attempt to flee their abusers. But what can we do?” One of the leaders, Makol, insisted. “What can we mere 5 people possibly do to change a situation that is so deeply rooted in our society?” The desperation was marked by the fine lines that creased his forehead due to the days, months and years of worrying for his people.

And Makol and his friends are right. In parts of Nepal giving birth to a daughter calls for celebration as it means that, later on, she will generate a considerable amount of income for her family. Trafficking has plagued the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal for many decades and it poses the main threat to the livelihoods of its children. Hundreds of thousands of young girls grow up in fear of the brutal destiny that awaits them: being sold into brothels in the red light districts of Kolkata, Siliguri, Kanpuir, New Delhi and Mumbai. And their parents rejoice in this as a success for the family…

When a problem is so culturally embedded in a society, providing emergency help and intervention is just simply not enough. This is why Viva and our partners in Nepal created “Daughter Project”, to help ministries and Christian groups, like the one Makol belongs to, prevent, as well as intervene in, situations of child trafficking. Daughter exposes and challenges the root causes and consequences of child abuse, sexual exploitation and trafficking in 9 regions along the Nepal-India border. The vision is to engage and raise awareness among communities about the realities of child sexual abuse and exploitation, so that these communities can be an informed and united voice on behalf of victims and survivors.

Makol and the 4 other Christian leaders are not alone; there are people willing to help but they just don’t know how. So it’s all a case of building the confidence in these people and instilling them with the belief that they can help, by encouraging them to break it down into sizeable chunks that their capacities will allow. "The strength of these particular Christian leaders is that they come from a town in the interior of Nepal. The area they live in is where trafficking is normally in its primary stages,” said a Viva partner volunteer present at the meeting. “Makol and his friends live in a tight-knit community. Using their status as pillars of the community they can get close to the families and work on strengthening the family unit. We must work with families to try and break the cycle of abuse and the cultural conflict that surrounds it in our country.”

A few weeks later, Makol and his friends had started working with their local community, holding awareness workshops using the “Daughter” toolkit and working with families. “We actually saved a girl from being trafficked!” Makol beamed in one of the feedback sessions with network workers. “She was going to be sent to India and we managed to save her and get her back to her family! It actually works! Thanks to our awareness campaigns the community spoke for itself as a united front against trafficking and the news got back to us,” he excitingly recounted to anyone eager to listen. After this, and with the help of Makol and the friends of other Christian leaders, this same community was then able to address the root cause – help strengthen families and encourage them to celebrate their children instead of treating them as possessions.

This is a story of one girl who was rescued from a life of who knows what abuse and torture and that is thanks to the work of 5 people. Viva and our partners in Nepal are equipping these willing people with the know-how to help girls and families together. On seeing this amazing ability to mobilise communities that “Daughter” has, other leaders have since joined forces with Makol in the fight against this problem that is so heavily engrained in local Nepalese culture. This is a great success for Viva’s work!

Watch this space as we report on how our “Daughter” grows from here…

The sum of the parts: what working together for children really means!

2011-04-21T14:35:00.000+01:00

Have you ever had to study for a particularly hard exam, spending all night awake, drinking Colombia out of coffee and racking your brains over one particular question you just don’t seem to get? And how many new mums have felt so desperate when bedtime arrives and their tiny infant just doesn’t seem to want to settle down and go to sleep? “I should know what my child needs!” might race through your mind.

There are many moments in life when we feel alone in the face of a certain problem. So what do we do? Well, naturally, we would seek out the advice of someone who’s been in a similar situation. And how often do we actually find that we are not alone; that many of our classmates have found that topic difficult, or that all new mums have felt frustrated at some point? Someone might even suggest a simple solution, “Have you tried swaddling?” that suddenly makes our lives that much brighter.

Here in the UK there are many people and processes in place to help make sure that help is at hand. But what if you are a poverty-stricken Mama and Papa, living in the slums of Kampala, not only scraping together a few coins to care for your own 5 children but also trying to take care of the 2 abandoned children that you found sleeping on your doorstep? These are the kind of people that Viva reaches out to, through our partner networks. People with huge hearts, who want to take care of these children but don’t have the money, the time or the know-how. They can never look beyond what one day throws at them and they rarely get any rest, becoming so completely engrossed by simple survival that they are unaware of what is going on around them and feel alone and desperate.

Situations such as these are exactly where Viva, and that trusty word ‘networking’, come into the game! The city-wide network in Kampala could help this Mama and Papa to meet others in similar situations, and to meet local projects, churches and groups who will provide support, prayer and, eventually, necessary resources. One small project once ran out of mosquito nets for their children, but, through the network, managed to get hold of other people’s spares… Another simple solution to a small, but potentially fatal, problem.

And that chain never ends… Our programme co-ordinator from Uganda recently went to Mwanza to share experiences and spread the ‘working together’ philosophy to other smaller and younger networks in Tanzania. She told the tales of the Kampala network, and how it has grown and developed over the years, surviving some very tough times at first: “We have grown through the sharing of knowledge and experience and have come out the other side a much stronger and more powerful network able to impact the lives of thousands of children!” she shared with the Mwanza network.

“When people are brought together by a common purpose there are all sorts of sparks of creativity,” she commented, after the meeting. “And when that purpose is children, you can just feel the added energy in the room.”

“Have you heard about the Early Encounter programme? It’s a great success in Latin America. That could be a strategy to use with street girls here in Mwanza,” was one of the many suggestions shooting around the room. “In the long term it’s always better to invest time and money into helping children get back to their families than keeping them in residential care,” said the Kampala networker to her Tanzanian counterpart.

And the learning curve continues, long beyond the limits of this article; from the individual to the thousands, this ‘networking’ just keeps going and going…

Early Encounter means 2 children saved from the streets EVERY DAY!

2011-04-13T12:28:00.006+01:00

“I’m a numbers man, and these numbers are really something - 712 children are no longer on the streets of Latin America as a result of Viva and the networks this year. That’s nearly two kids every day!” Brian Wilkinson, our Chief Operating Officer and main numbers man, has just recently returned from an Early Encounter programme visit in Peru. He particularly recalls one centre in Lima…

When we arrived, the hall was filled with young girls and boys, cradled babies, mothers, fathers and even grandparents. Many parents were still arriving even after the event had already started, some sweaty and tired from having to hurry from their jobs out on the streets. However, their faces were lit up with smiles, despite the fatigue, knowing that in just a few minutes they would all take part in the celebration of something very special: their child was going to be given the opportunity to go to school for the first time in their lives!

In one corner of the room there was a table, covered with multi-coloured bags stuffed full of school materials – in fact the exact items, as I was told by a colleague, that these same children would normally be selling on the streets of the very congested Lima, home to more than 10 million people.
Not having books and stationary and uniforms is one of the reasons that so many children miss out on education in Lima. And if they don’t go to school they are more likely to end up playing, working and maybe eventually living on the streets, which is why our Early Encounter project with the networks is working so hard to try and catch children before they end up trapped in that life.

So at this event 30 children were presented with these bags of school equipment, and it was a wonderful sight to see the smiles as they collected their gifts. Those children are now attending a local school that is part of the network, one that is specifically aimed at teaching and supporting Lima’s child street workers. “We witness such a development of talent and skills,” Doña Nelly, one of the teachers of the programme, explained to me. “When we encourage them to continue, children do start to realise that change is possible.”

But there is more to this celebration than meets the eye… Helping street children in Latin America is not as simple as just giving them a bag of school supplies or offering them a place to stay so they don’t sleep on the streets – in fact the majority of the kids aren’t actually homeless. They are normally children who get up at the crack of dawn to trawl the streets, selling anything and everything to passers-by, but, who then return home to their parents at night. And although these parents were all smiling and proud, allowing their children to go to school is actually a real compromise for them, as young girls and boys normally have much greater selling power. Letting them go to school means that the family’s income might take a serious hit. That’s why Early Encounter focuses so much on working with the whole family, teaching parents how to care and provide for their children without putting their futures at risk.

Handing out school packs.

This ethos was really clear throughout the day, especially towards the end of the ceremony when the City Council’s Social Development Officer got up to speak. “Children must live their childhood!” pronounced Maria Isabel Gonzalez. She told the entire room, “Treat your children well, don’t be afraid to hug them every day, and understand that play is far more important than working.” Then one particular mother, also a local shoe-shiner, gathered up the courage to step out in front of all of us, grab the microphone and interrupt the meeting, just to show her true appreciation for what the network has done both for her and her daughter. I was so struck by the sincerity in her voice, and by the gratitude I saw in every parent’s face, that this ceremony will always be a lasting memory of my visit.

Miguel's dream

2011-04-07T11:32:00.003+01:00

“Life is not easy, and as children we have faced many people treading on our dreams. But with my songs I am saying that whoever you are and whatever has happened to you, you can live your dreams.”

Miguel Arevalos has helped to lead several nationwide campaigns against child abuse, he is a singer and songwriter for a local band and he will soon begin presenting his own TV show, broadcast to 150,000 people in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Miguel is also just about to celebrate his 15th birthday.

“My father left us when I was seven” Miguel confides quietly. “He was very bad with alcohol problems and so angry, it was hard for us and for my mother.” When he abandoned them, Miguel’s mother was forced to send his two sisters to live in a local orphanage while she and Miguel sheltered at a boys’ home that is part of the Cochabamba network. Yet it was here that he had the chance to become a Child Leader. “We had a vote, and out of six others I was chosen to be the representative for our project” smiles Miguel, proudly remembering his peers’ faith in him. “I was our ambassador, our leader, and it was my job to plan how we could make our community listen and take notice of the needs of children like ourselves.”

Approximately 100 boys and girls from various projects in Viva’s six Bolivian networks are participating in the Child Leaders programme, collectively representing more than 10,000 young people across the nation. The programme trains up and supports young people like Miguel to be a voice for their peers, helping them to plan campaigns and events to change local people’s attitudes to domestic violence and child abuse, mobilising them to change children’s situations.

Since first becoming a Child Leader, now over four years ago, Miguel has spoken out for others in a variety of different ways, beginning with the network campaigns and growing into singing, songwriting and now television presenting. His band, Tuex, is made up of three boys and two girls all under the age of 18. Miguel says that it is his vision that one day their songs will be played all over the city, “in market squares and discos and all the popular places, speaking out against things such as violence, abortion and abuse.”

Miguel’s songs will also feature in his new television show, due to air in April this year, alongside music from other local bands, interviews with Christian leaders and information on issues in other countries. Miguel says he wants to inspire local children to look outside their situations and see the needs of the wider world, as well as encourage them about their own lives.

As Miguel’s leadership skills have grown and changed, so has his family. His mother is now one of the co-ordinators of the boy’s home where they once sheltered, and the modest income she receives has enabled the whole family to live together once more. “I am so thankful to God for my life” Miguel concludes gratefully. “Before I was a Child Leader I would never have had the courage to do any of these things, or even dream them. But being taught about my value to God and how I should be treated, and actually seeing positive change in my situation, gave me such confidence and hope.”
Thanks to Miguel that message, speaking of confidence in your dreams and hope for the future, will be carried into homes all over Cochabamba this year.

Click below to read this and other stories in the most recent vivanews.

100 successful students graduate Viva Equip in Uganda!

2011-03-31T17:54:00.001+01:00

“Children were lining up outside my office to confide in me!” An excited Macu tells a room full of smiling graduates, as she delivers a heartfelt speech at the recent Viva Equip People graduation ceremony on Saturday 26th March.

Macu, a recent Viva Equip graduate herself, is a Child Restoration Outreach Manager working in central Uganda. “I have been working with children for years, but before this training there were many grey areas where I just felt like I didn’t have the resources to help or protect children properly,” she explained to her fellow classmates, who were nodding in agreement. “But thanks to this training, my staff and I can now look after children much better. And what is most amazing is that the children are the first to notice the improvement.” She continued enthusiastically, “Never before have children queued so patiently at my door just for the opportunity to speak to me! But this is because they know now that there are people who will really listen to them and who think it is important to help them.” Her closing remarks beautifully summarise the overall benefit of the Viva Equip training: “I am a better person for it- I am a better worker, mother, neighbour, manager and friend and this will all now be reflected in my work with children; in how I treat them, care for them and protect them against the dangers that they have all had to face so far in their short lives.”

Macu is not the only one to feel this way. The ceremony has been an overwhelmingly positive event, with every conversation, speech and presentation reflecting the newfound confidence and ability of the 100 graduates in the room. When the course began, they were among the many people in Uganda willing to help children at risk but sometimes lacking the belief that they can help. Yet Viva believes in these people, and the VEP training is our way of making them believe in themselves. We want them to know that they can, do and will help thousands of children in their lifetime. And it’s not just theoretical, as David Nebali discovered…

David works in a community church in the mountains of Kabale, west Uganda, and through his role as Child Development Officer he has implemented the Child Protection Policy that they were taught to devise at VEP and can already demonstrate the big change seen in the way church members operate in his community: “For the first time a church worker reported a child protection issue to me, something that has never happened before!” A 16 year old girl from the community had abandoned her home and studies to marry an older man. “We encouraged her that it is so important for her to finish her studies.” David is still working with the girl, counselling her and encouraging her to move back home with her parents. “Thank goodness it was not just buried in the community, as it would have been before. Now I think we will soon see a breakthrough, as she is beginning to realise the enormity of her actions.”

Viva Equip People is not just having a local effect, transforming individuals, but it’s gaining national recognition: the government of Uganda insisted on sending a representative to honour the graduation ceremony. The Guest of Honour, Mondo Kyateka, Commissioner for Youth and Children’s Affairs in Uganda, closed the event by giving an encouraging speech to the graduates: “There is no better calling than working with and supporting children; they constitute the future. I want to thank Viva and the network for initiating the professionalisation of working with children in this country.”

If you would like more information on the benefits that Viva Equip brings to organisations, their workers and children everywhere, or you would like to support the work then click here.

Breaking taboos in Bangalore.

2011-03-24T16:32:00.001Z

Many people in the UK think that children are learning about sex too early. Magazines, television and the Internet have made it a familiar topic for most young people before they even reach secondary school. But in Bangalore, India, it seems that children may be learning about it too late.

“Sex education does not happen in most of India,” says Karuna Sagili, from Viva’s Delhi office. “All matters of the body and sexuality and sex are seen as taboo. In one school in Bangalore the teachers have stuck some pages together in the biology textbooks, so that children would not look at the pictures often. It is photos of a man and a woman, and all the parts of the body.”
Karuna feels that this widespread reluctance to discuss, or even acknowledge, sexuality, is a major contributor to the country’s high rate of child sexual abuse. “Things like rape or child abuse are never discussed by anyone, so how can those problems be dealt with and people be helped?” Well, on the southern tip of the subcontinent, the Bangalore chapter of Viva’s ASHA forum is helping to answer that question.

An India-wide project focused on bringing an end to child sexual abuse, ASHA, uses the city-wide networks as its local bases. “In Bangalore the team felt that we needed to begin simply – to affirm that sexuality is not bad, but is God-given,” shares Karuna. “Unless a child learns the value of their body, how can they ever realise what abuse is?” So, the ASHA team is going into local schools to talk with children about healthy expressions of sexuality.

The seminars have been held in several local schools and church-based education projects, and so far 348 girls and boys aged 10 to 16 have attended the sessions. One child wrote in her notes: “From now on I will not trust anyone who makes me uncomfortable”.

After the seminars are over, the team make sure that they carefully follow up with the schools. The ASHA team go back into the schools on a weekly basis following the sessions, and as different needs arise they can bring relevant network contacts with them, such as doctors or trauma counsellors. “Just talking about the issues, and seeing children become more aware, is such an important step,” says Karuna. “Only once the taboo is broken can we see the way forward to making sure India’s children are always kept safe.”

Click on the photo below to read the full article in vivanews.

Booming bass, flashing lights, jangling pianos… help for children at risk!

2011-03-18T15:20:00.003Z

Last weekend about 50 of Oxford’s music-loving 20-somethings helped to raise money for children at risk by going to a rather unusual house party....

“It all began when I bought a smoke machine back in January… you can’t have a smoke machine and not scheme about how to use it!” says self-titled ‘Event Organiser’ Chris Swinburne. “And since we know so many people who are musical and in local bands, it seemed a great idea to have a kind of house party event that could showcase that.”

Featuring local acts such as The Kid Steel, Drake’s Drum and Charlie Mike Sierra (look and listen below, in the video!) playing a mix of covers and original tunes, and collecting over £50 for Viva, it really raised the bar for the average house party. “We just charged a small entry fee, more of a suggested donation really, so it was very low-key,” Chris explains. “But it seemed a great way to turn a fun evening into something more meaningful too.” The Number 8 housemates transformed their living room with blackout curtains, a full lighting rig, the infamous smoke machine and even a live TV link for those in other parts of the house!
Ears still ringing, guests trooped out at around 1am offering parting comments like “completely brilliant” “best house party ever” and “so, when’s the next one?!”

“We’d definitely do it again,” Chris enthuses. “I loved every minute of it. Perhaps in the summer we could make it a whole street party…” So, if you’re an Oxford resident keep your eye on Headington to see if Number 8’s neighbours can be convinced! For everyone else, no matter where you live, why not start brainstorming about how you could do some FUNdraising for children at risk?

4-14 European Prayer Conference: empowering youth through prayer.

2011-03-14T18:29:00.000Z

“Seeing the synergy between prayer and activism was a great awakening!”

Our International Prayer Co-ordinator, Chrissie, recently had the privilege of seeing what children can accomplish for their nations when you just give them the chance.

Friday 18th - Tuesday 21st February witnessed the 1st European 4-14 Consultation of Children in Transformational Ministry, hosted by Viva and Hope for Europe. 4-14 gets its name from a variation on the 10/40 Window theme. It refers to the fact that children between the ages of 4 and 14 are the most open and receptive to every form of spiritual and developmental input.

Chrissie says, “This is an opportune window for a previously silenced group of people to become key figures of transformational ministry. God is calling us to alter the way we view children and to respond to their importance and rightful place in his kingdom.”

30 attendees between 10 and 14 years, representing Finland, Slovakia, Croatia, Belgium, England, Scotland and Austria, all came together in Hastings for a weekend of prayer, discussion and activism. Children were invited to speak out about the problems that the young people in their own nations are facing, to listen to God and guide each other in praying for a better world for young people.

“It was a time for us to stop and realise how broken the young people of Europe are. One example brought to light was that the young people of Finland were suffering terribly high levels of depression. We were then able to pray together for all the hardships of the youth of today.”

And was it successful? “It most certainly was! It was such an incredible experience. There was a real sense of a blessing from God for Europe’s youth. Both adult and child attendees went away with a change in belief of what God can achieve.” The 30 young people who came to the event were so inspired that they went away and started up their own Facebook groups for further discussions and interaction. “It was so great for children of different nationalities to get to know one another; lots of fun was had all round and prayer was recognised as a wonderful form of advocacy. We have also kick-started the process of these young people leading prayer and change movements in their own nations. I can’t wait to see where this leads.”

Viva believes in networking, in working together for children. But, as Chrissie reminds us, “we must also work with them. This weekend has so clearly shown that when children are given an opportunity, they rise to it.” She sums up the weekend with this clear call: “We must give children a voice and then we must listen. I know God is.”

Uganda Elections: the results are in, but what does this mean for children?

2011-02-23T11:54:00.001Z

After much campaigning, debate and speculation, Yoweri Museveni has won the Ugandan Presidential Elections for the fourth time in a row. But what does this mean for 57% of Uganda’s population – its children...?

The answer is, we don’t yet know. BUT...What we do know is that before the elections the Ugandan Government launched a National Strategic Plan for providing comprehensive services to orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs). The National Strategic Plan states that the government is not able to meet its mandate for providing for all children and currently only reaches 11% of all vulnerable children with any form of support. So the government has appealed to civil society and to faith-based organisations to work with them in the huge task that lies ahead. The country has been given large grants for improving education and health and Viva hopes to partner and support them in the delivery of this.

Our partner networks in Uganda are hoping to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the government to have the work they do for children at risk recognised officially. Isobel Booth-Clibborn (Regional Co-ordinator of Viva Africa) and Rudo Kwaramba (National Director of World Vision) recently met with the Archbishop of Uganda to share and discuss what the country is doing for Uganda’s children. At the meeting Archbishop Orombi said, “The most significant thing any leader can do is to invest in youth and children.” He said he was encouraged to see more of his diocese taking this seriously.

Viva believes there is great value in equipping the church as a key partner, through networking, to make a difference in the lives of children at risk across the country, through different denominations as well as grass roots churches.

On a further note, Kampala was supposed to be hearing the results of its mayoral elections today, which could also potentially have a big impact on the children of Uganda, however, they have been cancelled due to "alleged rigging" and "ensuing violence", with the new date to "be communicated later".

Keep an eye on the Viva blog to see where all this takes us and the children of Uganda….

NOW in Kampala, Uganda: child-friendly voting!

2011-02-10T15:15:00.017Z

This news is coming straight from Kampala where, as you read this, projects and churches from our partner network have taken to the streets to encourage voters to consider the rights and needs of Uganda's children.

In the light of the upcoming elections for a new President and government (Friday 18th February) the network are conducting an advocacy campaign encouraging citizens to think about children when they vote. They have been asking questions such as: Do you recognise the importance of today’s children? Will the person you vote for be the best person to lead the next generation into the future?

Thousands of flyers and car stickers are being given out across Kampala today. They hope to continue this through the local election period, which follows on from the presidential elections.

The network is also continuing to promote issues surrounding children at risk in general, through TV adverts shown just before prime time Ugandan news both before and after polling day. They hope it will encourage those newly in power to think about their responsibilities towards the children and young people of Uganda.

People currently being filmed for the TV adverts include Henry Orombi (the Archbishop of Uganda), Rudo Kwaramba (World Vision’s National Director) and Judith Babirye (a well-known Ugandan gospel artist). On each short advert the Ugandan spokesperson says ‘During this election period I’m keeping children safe, what about you?’ Listen here to one of the radio adverts that Ugandan citizens have been hearing all week.

If you would like to follow the election progress situation in Uganda you can find updated information on the following platform for Ugandan news and information: http://www.weinformers.net/tag/uganda-2011-general-elections/

Watch this space for more information and stories on the awareness-raising activities that Uganda are doing to promote children’s rights…

Daya gets a new home

2011-01-28T09:14:00.002Z

In a culture that places great importance on family and tradition, bringing a child from the streets into your own home is not something people do lightly. Yet when Udita Kapoor met seven-year-old Daya in one of the poorest parts of Biratnagar, Nepal, she knew that was exactly what she wanted to do. Why? Because what she had learned through Viva Equip People had engaged her heart as well as her head.

The Viva Equip People training is currently running in Biratnagar, Butwal and Kathmandu, and Udita is one of 20 church and project staff taking the course in her area. Learning how to help children in the context of their culture, family and background, and understanding how to value and listen to them, were quite new concepts to Udita, and she found that it transformed the way she interacted with children.

She came across Daya during a visit to a community project, and discovered that he had no family to care for him. He was simply drifting, begging and relying on the charity of neighbours, and as he had been living this way for several years his health was very poor. Udita felt moved by Daya’s situation, and was compelled to respond in a much more personal way than she would have ever considered before. She chose to take him into her own home, giving him good food and proper clothes, and taking him to the hospital to receive proper treatment and medication.

Udita’s decision was not an easy one as many people, including her own parents, were quite opposed to her looking after Daya. But she now has the support of her new husband, who she married just a few months ago, and together they have given Daya a safe home and a new family.

My Viva Equip trip to India

2011-01-28T09:08:00.002Z

There’s nothing quite like your first experience of India. The combination of muggy heat, exotic spices and petrol fumes hit me almost as soon as I stepped off the plane a few weeks ago. It was my first trip to India, and I didn’t quite know what to expect.

I had travelled out to Delhi to teach the co-ordinators of three of our city-wide networks (in Delhi, Dehradun and Hyderabad) how to run Viva Equip Projects in their respective cities, using Viva’s Quality Improvement System.

I was a little intimidated before we began, as I was training five men, but they were such a lovely group that after about five minutes I felt completely at home with them. Our time flew by, and their enthusiasm was so encouraging - there seems such a hunger and thirst for quality care in India.

Those five guys represent networks that are connecting a total of more than 170 projects, and they are hoping to enrol between 50 and 60 of these to the Viva Equip Projects programme. But those are just numbers, and don’t really convey the heart of what this training will mean in the lives of children. The thing that made me so enthusiastic about starting Viva Equip Projects in India was that I know the kind of transformation that is possible when organisations are not only compassionate but also capable. I’ve seen it happen in other cities around the world as I’ve helped to introduce Viva Equip, and I look forward to seeing it take off here too.

But even on this trip, although the programme is just beginning, I caught a small glimpse of what that might look like here when I spent a fascinating two hours talking to a woman called Sharmla. While Sharmla hasn’t had a chance to do Viva’s Equip training yet, she is involved in our Girl Child initiative helping to mentor young girls in the slum communities of Delhi. She had been working with one girl whose mother was a prostitute, who was really pressurising her daughter to start working with her. They struggled for money, and the girl knew that resigning herself to prostitution would provide much-needed income, yet she was reluctant to end up in her mother’s situation.

Because the Girl Child programme had prepared Sharmla well, she knew how to support and encourage the young girl, helping her to stand up for her rights and fight for a different future. That girl is now in school every day, getting an education that will hopefully prevent her from ending up in the same awful situation as her mother. Other projects in the network are also working together to support the family, and the girl’s mother no longer feels so pressured to use drastic means to bring in money for her family.

This girl’s life has been turned around, and all because Sharmla had the right information and the right skills to help her. Girl Child is focusing on one particular area of need, and Viva Equip will be helping projects working on a variety of issues, but the principle is still the same – transformation is possible when people, and the organisations they belong to, are both willing and able to help children.

I loved my first trip to India, and I hope I get to go back again some day. Not only for the amazing sights, sounds and smells, but to see how Viva Equip Projects is empowering people like Sharmla to bring new hope to their country’s children.

* J from Viva, UK

Uganda’s children have their say on Viva Equip Projects

2011-01-28T08:51:00.001Z

We often hear great stories of how Viva Equip Projects is helping organisations become stronger and more competent, and we know that will ultimately be beneficial to the children in that project’s care. But why take our word for it? Let’s make a trip to the classrooms of House of Joy in Kampala, and hear what their children think of the training their project has received…

Charity Nnabayego, aged 8

Over the last year, what have you seen changing here?

Teachers treat me well, and never shout or hurt us. And I go to my studies in a good chair and a good desk, so I am learning much better. I am more clever now than before.

Do you feel safe? If so, why?

Yes, so very safe, as I know now I can talk to my teachers and they will help me.

What are you thankful for?
I am close to safe and clean water now. I am very happy here.

Amos Kirye, aged 11

Over the last year, what have you seen changing here?We have such a good diet and eat well, and they give us more time to rest from our hard classes and we play. They have bought footballs for us also. This is my favourite!

Do you feel safe? If so, why?

I am now a leader to others, as I am a head prefect in my school. So I feel safe and I can help the other children to know that they are safe.

What are you thankful for?

I have good health, and my mother and father are living and take care of me. And I think that the government should provide free uniforms for us when we go to school, so I am praying for this also that God will work it.

Shadia Mwesigwa, aged 14

Over the last year, what have you seen changing here?We have proper latrines now, and a [bore] hole with clean water for us. We also can study in buildings now instead of outside, and we each have one chair.

Do you feel safe? If so, why?

I know I am safe and cared for because of the things people do for me. That shows me I am safe.

What are you thankful for?

I am brighter than I was before, and I know more. I know God better and I love to pray so much more. I am also able to get school fees for my studies.

Viva Equip People journeys to Somalia’s frontline

2011-01-28T08:42:00.000Z

Oketch Mukhwana, a soldier in the Ugandan Army, took part in Viva Equip People when he began working in the children’s department of a military hospital. “We are working with the children of soldiers” Oketch explains, “and there are so many special things about their lives we must understand if we want to help them properly. But before I did not have any experience of working with children, and there was so much I did not know. When I started on this Viva programme it was amazing how my eyes were opened.” Oketch was particularly struck by the module about understanding each child in his or her context, learning what exact risks children face and how to help them thrive despite the problems.

Unfortunately, halfway through the training, Oketch was recalled to Somalia for a peace-keeping mission and had to leave the course. However he insisted that the Ugandan Army send someone else to replace him, saying “we must not miss out on this training. It is so vital.” He visited the Viva Equip People centre in Kampala before he left, to talk to staff about how he could use what he learnt even while he was stationed in Somalia. He said that he would ask to be assigned to a children’s department while he was out there, and vowed to “fight for and protect children’s rights while in Somalia and elsewhere on the frontline”.

“I wish they would make it a policy that every Ugandan army officer working with children undergoes this training” Oketch told us. “And when I am leaving Somalia I will definitely be back to finish this course, even if the army does not pay for me I will come! I hope to be ready for the start of training in March, and I am very excited about it.”

Is Viva Equip making projects too good?

2011-01-26T20:18:00.000Z

From staff management and financial accountability to child protection and wellbeing, Viva Equip Projects has built a great reputation for addressing issues of effective child care. But in La Paz, Bolivia, it seems a new issue has emerged, for which Viva Equip Projects is not the solution but in fact the cause: the projects are getting too popular!

Local projects which have undergone the training have seen such a noticeable improvement in the quality of care they offer, that they have now reached capacity and are struggling to take in any more children. “Projects here used to have problems where children would run away and go back to the streets, they were so used to their old way of life” says local Viva Equip co-ordinator Henry Pers Lopez. “But now the care in the projects is so good that the children are no longer running away, and it actually means that the organisations are getting so full!”

Many of the projects in the La Paz network are either schools or transition homes that are preparing children to be re-integrated into their families, fostered or adopted, and so they are a vital help and support to their neighbourhoods. While it is a very positive step that their standards of care have been so tangibly improved, it highlights the need to ensure that as many organisations as possible have the chance to develop the quality of the care they offer.

Henry reports that the network has now begun referring children to government institutions and other organisations outside the network, as member projects simply have no more room: “We always make sure children are going to a place that can give them the best care possible, even when those places are not part of the network. But we know that organisations are stronger when they are part of a team, and when they have been given proper standards. So we are just wanting to do Viva Equip Projects more and more. We are hopeful one day this will not be a problem because every organisation in the country working with children will have done the training!”

** Could you or your school, family or workplace help even one more project to receive this vital training? Check out how you could support Viva Equip Projects

December December the month to remember... in El Salvador

2011-01-21T08:44:00.001Z

How many of us wish that we could send a message directly to the government? That we could tell them the things we think are important, and highlight what needs to change? Well in a community playground in the heart of El Salvador’s capital city, 400 children let the leaders of their country know exactly what was on their minds.

For this particular Christmas Party our local network partnered with the Ministry of Social Inclusion, and together they developed the idea of allowing the children to send messages back to the wider government. So amid the chaos of games, clowns, face painting and presents, a giant mural was created with hundreds of messages for the country of El Salvador. Every child at the Party was encouraged to write or draw on the mural, which was delivered to the local government offices in the week following the party.

El Salvador is home to more than 7 million people, approximately 36% of which are under the age of 14. Yet despite their youth, this group seem to have a pretty good grasp on the things that could help their country become a better place. Roberto, aged 12, wrote that “we should have no children on the streets” and 9-year old Nancy wrote “let there be no violence and crime”. Nubia, at only 11 years old, was very direct in saying “the President should do good things for the country” and a surprising environmental awareness was shown by Ramos, aged 10, when he wrote “Do not cut down trees, and you will have a better El Salvador. We must look after our country for the future” and illustrated his message with colourful forests and rivers.

So although the party is over, who knows what changes we might see this year, now that the El Salvadorian government have a clearer picture of what a third of their country thinks is important…

December December the month to remember... in Kenya

2011-01-21T08:44:00.000Z

In the Manyatta slum, opportunities for children to stand up and be heard by crowds of over 800 people are pretty rare. Yet that’s exactly what 12-year old Gaya got to do at the Viva Christmas Party in his community just a few weeks ago.

Gaya’s church is part of our city-wide network in Kisumu, Kenya, and so when the network decided to hold a Christmas Party he was one of more than 700 children to attend the festivities. The meal they ate together provided a welcome change from the daily fare of maize and beans, the presents they received were, for many, the first toys they had ever owned and the games were enjoyed by attendees of all ages.

In the afternoon all the children and adults gathered together to hear the Christmas message, which Gaya had been chosen to help present. “I spoke for a time of 10 minutes and they were all listening to me!” he told us proudly. “I never had this opportunity to speak to so many people, it made me feel very honoured and happy.”

As a result of the party Gaya is now involved in Viva’s Child Ambassadors programme, which focuses on developing children’s leadership skills and empowering them to play a part in shaping their own futures. He felt so encouraged by his experience at Christmas, and by the network’s faith in him, that he wanted to commit to help other children gain confidence to talk with adults and know they have the right to be heard, and has vowed to “speak up for children everywhere, and help them to do the same thing.”

December December the month to remember... in India

2011-01-21T08:43:00.000Z

When our city-wide network in Delhi, India, held a Viva Christmas Party a few weeks ago they gave every project attending the chance to perform. Songs, dances and dramas were played out by more than 100 children for the entertainment of their peers, including 13 children from a project that helps young people with autism and other disabilities.

“For these children it was a totally new experience” says Viva India staff member Gary Kamaal. “Not just that they were invited to perform in front of so many people, but to perform alongside other children and be given equal status - that was so amazing and wonderful to them. You could see in their faces they felt so special, and they really loved doing their act.”

Along with their project staff the children performed a five-minute gymnastics routine set to lively Indian music, involving very daring tumbling and dancing. The routine concluded to enthusiastic applause from the other children and carers, and the enjoyment of the performers was evident in the big smiles they wore throughout the presentation. Gary also told us that the children’s reaction to the performance was a personal highlight for him as it showed “their acceptance of the children with special needs - they did not treat them differently at all.” In fact he was delighted to see that children of all ages, abilities and backgrounds were interacting and enjoying the performances and games together throughout the day.

This was the first time this project had been involved in a Viva Christmas Party, and they were very positive about the experiences it offered their children. And because they are a part of the network, they will be able to work with other local projects to show those children exactly what equal opportunities can mean all year round.

And so the student becomes the teacher

2011-01-20T12:15:00.000Z

When Grace Nyiringabo took the Viva Equip People training two years ago she had no idea that she would one day end up actually teaching it!

In 2009, alongside 40 other project staff working with children at risk in Mbale, Uganda, Grace spent eight months gaining the key skills needed for effective and compassionate child care. “This course helped me so much” says Grace. “I feel that spiritually I have grown and my heart has been changed. I didn’t know how to handle children at my work place, and I was not doing my work from the bottom of my heart but really just to earn a living. Now I can confidently say that I am committed to seeing the lives of children changed and helping them become better people- all that God intended them to be.”

Viva staff were so impressed with Grace, and the way that she was implementing what she had learnt, that they felt it right to approach her to be one of the trainers for the 2011 course. Beginning in March this year the course is taking place at five centres across Uganda, and 200 new students are expected to enrol. Over the last year seven other particularly successful VEP alumni from Mbale, Gulu and Kampala have also been asked to become trainers for this next course.

The co-ordinator of Viva’s national network in Uganda, Patrick Jumah, feels strongly that continuing this model of trainees becoming trainers will be beneficial on many levels: “These people have gone through the whole course. They are not just specialists in one module or topic, but they know what it is to study all the parts. They are showing to be wonderful mentors to those going through the training now, and an amazing support.”

Another benefit of these students-turned-trainers is that they actually help to alleviate some of the financial pressure of the training. “So many of the people who have done the course and now are trainers are happy to give their time for a much lower cost” Jumah shares. “They have seen the benefit of the training, and they are so motivated to teach others that they do not need to make a lot of money from it. They are so happy to be there and teaching more projects.”

Grace agrees wholeheartedly, saying “It is a privilege now to be passing on this learning. I know that it has not only equipped me with skills and knowledge but it has also transformed my life, and I hope to help others now experience the same thing.”

Simon says ... keep children safe!

2011-01-11T15:01:00.001Z

Throughout the years of my childhood I played the game ‘Simon says’ hundreds of times. You know – Simon says wave your arms in the air, Simon says stick out your tongue... But never once did I play it as part of a lesson on sexual and physical abuse.

Just before Christmas I visited a school in Manchay (a district in the desert-like hills above Lima, Peru) that is using all kinds of games, songs and stories to teach children about the value of their bodies. On the day that I was there I arrived just as a class of 10-year olds were finishing off a fairly chaotic and laughter-filled game of 'Simon says' (Simón dice in Spanish) and then watched as the teacher proceeded to relate the game to real life.

She explained that just like in the game where sometimes you’re supposed to do what ‘Simon’ tells you, and other times you’re not, it’s the same in life. It’s important to be respectful and obedient to adults, but if a grown-up (or even a peer) asks you to do something wrong or inappropriate then it's OK not to obey them – in fact you shouldn’t. As an example the teacher then referred to some pictures on the wall that the class had worked on the week before – black and white drawings of girls and boys where the children had been asked to colour in green all the areas that were ok for other people to touch, and in red the areas that were not.

The teacher later told me that there are a lot of young pregnancies in this area of Peru, and sadly a lot of single mothers. So for many children the main male figure in their life is an uncle, a grandfather, or simply a string of their mother’s boyfriends. Because of the level of poverty these broken, mixed-up and extended families often share rooms, sometimes even beds. The opportunities for all kinds of abuse are many and varied. But thanks to Viva’s city-wide network in Manchay, things are beginning to change. The school I visited is just one of several projects and churches that are working together to uncover and prevent sexual, physical and emotional abuse.

Using Viva materials, particularly focussing on a teaching manual produced in partnership with Youth for Christ, the 15 schools and churches in the network have an opportunity to teach kids about how valuable and special they are, and how they should (and should not) be treated by adults. I spoke with several teachers at this school, and also with one of the local pastors, and they were all really encouraged by the progress being made.

One teacher said “We’re so thankful for the Viva materials. Many of the facts I already knew, but this book has shown me how to teach those facts to the children in a way they can really understand. And the children are responding – many of them have actually come forward and confided in me about situations going on at home.” Another said, “I have always known that abuse was going on in this area, but I did not know so many of the children in my own class were affected. It’s awful, but at least now we know we can do something about it.”

The network plays a vital part in dealing with the cases of abuse that come to light as a result of the teaching. While the schools have good links with the government, and tend to focus on trying to prosecute the abusers, the churches have strong links in the community and work closely with the victim and their family. Working together in this way means that the child can be counselled and encouraged, the family can be supported and shown how to prevent further abuse, and the perpetrator can be brought to justice.

Most people have never heard of dusty little Manchay, and few will venture far enough outside of bustling Lima to visit it. But I’m glad I took a trip off the beaten track. I got to see the creativity and dedication that is being put into play to keep children safe and show them that they are loved, and I got to see how people are pulling together to change a whole community. Simon says join in! There’s a lot you can do…

~ B, Viva UK

Helping Churches Respond to War

2011-01-02T16:21:00.001Z

As Viva’s International Prayer Co-ordinator, I get to travel around to conferences and events worldwide, as well as helping local children get involved in prayer right here in Oxford and throughout England. I’ve recently come back from Sri Lanka, where I was a keynote speaker for a conference on intercessory prayer for Asia. Needless to say it was exciting!

Viva doesn’t have an official network in Sri Lanka, but we’re building relationships with projects and churches around this beautiful island that want to work together to address the enormous needs facing Sri Lankan children in the aftermath of decades of war and ever-present poverty. After my speaking engagement in Colombo I did two days of workshops with children’s workers (and children!) to help the adults learn to involve children in prayer, teaching them to hear God for themselves from a young age.

After my time in Colombo I was whisked up to the northern city of Jaffna by Ministry of Defence plane – as I said, exciting! Jaffna is where the majority of the recent war took place, with Tamil Tiger rebels facing off against government forces. I spent time here in Palaam Children’s Home, which started as a local church’s response to the needs of children in the community who were affected by the war. Now it’s filled with children who were orphaned during the war or by the tsunami. An African saying applies well here: when two elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers most. Children are often hit hardest in times of war, as I was reminded in Jaffna.

The war officially ended two years ago, but many children are still suffering the impact of just being born while it went on: thousands of children born during the war have no birth certificates, because their parents were unable to get to government offices to register their births. While this may not sound as dire as losing family members or being physically hurt, it does mean the children have no legal status. They’re not recognised by the government, which means they miss out on school – the one opportunity they have to climb out of poverty. Even worse, many of these unregistered children actually did lose their parents, so they’re now completely destitute.

One girl I met had lost both parents and ended up in a camp for internally displaced people. She had met a family in the camp and attached herself to them. When they left, she tagged along. They weren’t able to give her long-term support, but helped her get out of the horrible camp conditions. As they drove down the road, they saw a signpost to the Palaam Children’s Home and took the chance to make sure this little girl got proper help. Now she’s a permanent member of the Palaam family and is on her way to getting registration and a birth certificate.

In fact, Palaam Children’s Home has its hands full caring for these children and trying to get each orphaned child legally registered. From my years of experience at Viva, I know how desperately they could use the help of other projects and churches in Jaffna that are doing the same work or can offer other support. Right now Viva is trying to get familiar with some projects doing significant work, and sharing about the benefits of working together. We’re also encouraging churches to get involved in caring for children at risk.

It’s amazingly difficult to get anything done at the moment, as the government is clamping down on non-governmental organisations and small projects have many levels of bureaucracy to climb through. Aside from that, many churches are suspicious of reaching out and working together. Years of violence and mistrust can undermine people’s faith in one another, and the church needs to overcome this obstacle before it can really set about helping Sri Lankan children.

But we’ve seen churches do it before, and I know God is big enough to break down human barriers! We’re definitely watching and praying with anticipation for this hurting but amazing country.

~ C, International Prayer Co-ordinator, UK

Party on, Nepal

2010-12-17T20:47:00.000Z

Viva Christmas Parties are gearing up around the world. Actually, quite a few have already happened! If you’re getting involved in ‘Your Party, Their Christmas’ or ‘Your Gift, Their Christmas’ you already know that Viva Christmas Parties are not only a blast for kids, but they link vulnerable children up with projects that can provide them with help and support for the rest of their lives. What a reason to celebrate!

In Nepal, though, Viva Christmas Parties haven’t just helped get children connected with projects – they’ve helped make it possible for projects to connect with one another. As in many other places around the world, Nepalese organisations that help children at risk have traditionally tended to keep to themselves. Opening up your management, fundraising and resources to other projects can be a terrifying task. Our partner network CarNet Nepal discovered that Viva Christmas Parties are a great way to develop the trust and rapport between projects that are necessary to form a network.

How does a Christmas party do all that? Projects and churches that want to form networks find it hard to start by tackling huge issues like child homelessness or trafficking, although these are issues that affect Nepalese children. So they start by working together on something small that builds the confidence and competence to take on the big things later! Viva Christmas Parties have helped Nepalese projects focus on a goal – a party – that is easily achieved and makes big issues seem smaller. Have you ever watched a baby learn to walk? He probably didn’t try to take on a flight of stairs first, did he?

Viva Christmas Parties can also help Viva get a feel for what internal and external issues face a group of projects, so that we can provide the best support and advice for them as they grow into a network.

Although Viva Christmas Parties weren’t the only thing that brought the members of CarNet Nepal together, they were a big help (and of course a giant joy to all the children who attended!). In the end it’s the determination of individual people and projects that really makes a network pull together and survive through the many difficulties related to caring for children at risk. Christmas Parties are a fantastic way to show these projects what acting as a network feels like, and to help them reach out to local children at an early stage to see what needs exist in their neighbourhoods.

Now Christmas Parties are a yearly event in the CarNet Nepal projects! Do you remember what you were doing on December 5th? Well in the south eastern region of Nepal, 500 children were attending parties in Biratnagar and Jhapa. On December 10th, 300 children partied in Birgunj, in the central border district from where many children are trafficked to India, and 750 others celebrated in Nuwakot, Kanchhanpur and Butwal. On December 12, 1,200 children attended a giant Christmas Party in the capital, Kathmandu!

Across Nepal this month, that’s 2,750 vulnerable children – some who live on the streets, others who have been rescued from abuse or trafficking, and others who just come from poor families – having a great time while being introduced to projects and networks that can help them grow into healthy adults by working together to provide for their needs. Party on, Nepal!

Want to help by throwing a party of your own or by giving an alternative gift? Go to www.viva.org/christmasParties/.

Big Heart for Cochabambinas

2010-12-10T16:50:00.000Z

I’ve been in Peru and Bolivia for almost 3 weeks now, and I’ve eaten llama and guinea pig, been horseback riding in the Andean mountains, stayed in 9 different hostels and spent a total of 43 hours on long-distance buses! And today didn’t fail to bring yet another new experience…

This afternoon I stood in front of a lovely red brick house, built at the bottom of a deep green valley surrounded by awesome mountains and framed against a clear blue sky. The handwritten sign above the door of the house read ‘Corazon Grande’ (big heart) and it was one of the most tranquil and beautiful places I’ve seen on this trip. Yet the stories of the girls who currently live in the house are almost the complete opposite.

A member of Viva’s Cochabamba network, Corazon Grande cares for 14 girls between the ages of 6 months and 15 years. Some of the girls are orphans, others were simply abandoned by their families, and a sadly high number ran away after suffering sexual or physical abuse in their own homes. Corazon Grande offers the girls a safe place to live, nutritious meals, healthcare, basic education and regular counselling to try and help them work through their difficult experiences.

A few months ago about 8 of the girls took part in a national Viva campaign - Cero Tolerancia al Sexual Abuso Infantil (no tolerance of child sexual abuse) - joining with thousands of other children across Bolivia. Carla, the director of the home, said she noticed a difference in the girls even while the campaign was still going on, telling me that they were “so confident and happy, and more strong - just being part of this big thing that says ‘you matter, you are important, and there are people who will fight to protect you’.” Yet she would never have predicted what the end of the campaign would bring out.

Two of the girls staying at Corazon Grande, girls that had so far been very quiet and unresponsive in the counselling sessions, came to Carla and told her that the director of the school they were at had been sexually abusing them. They told Carla that it had been happening for a while, but they were too scared to say anything. But after the campaign they realised that other adults were saying that it was not ok, and that there were people who would stick up for them and help them if they told someone.

Now Corazon Grande is working with both the network and the local government to make sure the girls are helped and kept safe and that the head of the school is properly dealt with. The government departments for Education and for the Protection of Children are both involved, and the network members have been supporting and praying for the Corazon Grande staff as they help the girls deal with the trauma of what they experienced. Carla also told me that Viva and the network were a great help when she needed to find another school for the girls, as obviously they had to be moved immediately, and the contacts of the network made it easy to place the girls in a new class.

Although much of what I saw and heard today provided a new experience, albeit quite a sad and challenging one, there was one part of it that was reassuringly familiar. I saw, as I always see when I travel with my job, how real people’s lives are being changed by the power of working together. Those two girls’ lives are already showing changes, and I have faith that they will continue to heal and grow, and it took the combined efforts of many different people to bring that about. So yes I really enjoyed the taste of alpaca, yes the many hostels have been entertaining and yes I’ve got some incredible photos of the scenery. But really what I’m bringing back with me is yet more exciting, humbling and inspiring proof that together we really can do more for the struggling children of this world.

~ B from Viva International Office

Party Time!

2010-11-19T16:46:00.001Z

To most children in the UK, December 25th means a holiday, presents, turkey, stockings and big family gatherings. But for children all over the developing world it's just one more day to survive - no presents, feasts or holiday cheer. If you could throw a Christmas party for thousands of vulnerable children, would you?

We would!

If you're a regular reader, you know that Viva's raison d'etre is making a difference for children at risk. We do this by helping projects that already exist and help children, to work together to do their jobs better and more efficiently.

What better way to get people, projects and churches to work together than by throwing a giant party! Every year thousands of children across Africa, Asia and Latin America get to celebrate Christmas because hundreds of projects work together to throw them parties, with Viva's coordination and support.

At a Viva Christmas Party each child eats a local version of Christmas dinner, receives a present and is treated to a great day out. Many of the countries we work in have warm Christmases, so parties in the past have featured visits to waterslides, local beaches or theme parks. Can you imagine the look on her face when the little girl growing up in a slum takes her first ever trip down a waterslide?

These parties aren't just about one day of fun and friends, though. The most important element of Viva Christmas Parties is connecting children to local projects that can provide them with education, food, health care and love for years to come. What starts with a Christmas Party ends up being a brighter life. (And isn't that what Christmas is all about?)

8-year-old Anil went to a Viva Christmas Party in Bangalore last year. He remembers: "There were lots of things that made me happy on that Christmas Party day like dancing, singing Christmas songs, receiving gifts, painting our faces for the mime and participating in the acting on stage. It was my first time to do all these things!"

Gloria had been living on the streets of Harare for a while when she heard about local Viva Christmas Parties. She knew right away that she wanted to help out at all the parties... and she did! At the parties, Gloria met other children and teenagers from local communities and as a result of talking with them, she decided to return home to her family.

Get involved - make this Christmas merry and bright for a child at risk. Go to www.viva.org/ChristmasParties/ for ideas.

El Salvador Launches New Strategy Against Child Abuse

2010-11-12T19:04:00.003Z

In 1980 a group of 11-year old boys in El Salvador made a simple agreement: to stick together and defend one another on the dangerous streets they called home. They called themselves Mara Salvatrucha. Today, it’s one of the deadliest gangs in the western hemisphere and has more than 25,000 members across Central America. Street children aren’t just victims of violence. Because of their vulnerable situations they’re perfectly primed to be recruited into gangs, or even form them.

El Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America. It’s slightly bigger than Wales, but with 7 million people. A majority of Salvadorans work on farms, usually growing coffee, and many parents send their children out to work in the fields as extra labourers to help feed the family. Extreme poverty causes all kinds of problems within families, and as our regular readers will know the number children who are abused in their own homes is scarily high. These children so often end up fleeing their homes and living a life on the streets, where they aren’t expected to survive longer than about four years… if glue sniffing, disease or malnutrition don’t kill them, violence often will.

So we need to make sure they stay with their families, where we have a better chance of helping them and keeping them safe. That’s why Viva El Salvador is joining forces with the Salvadoran Ministry of Education to try and stop children from leaving their homes, by addressing the problems that lead to child abuse.

We’re going to begin by interviewing 800 schoolchildren in high-risk areas around the country, finding out where, when and why domestic child abuse takes place in El Salvador. Once we are more familiar with the root causes, we can begin working closely with each child to teach them how to prevent abuse and restore their rights. We will also take the same steps with children living on the streets, with the aim of helping them reconcile with their families and return home.

In other Latin American countries, Viva’s city-wide networks have been crucial in bringing healing to children and their parents through family mediation programmes, job training for unemployed parents, addiction counseling and education for children who can’t attend school. By helping families raise their standard of living, we’re actually helping treat the root causes of child abuse, not just sticking a plaster on the open wound.

So although this programme is just beginning in El Salvador, we have high hopes that it will do a good job of helping children stay safe. Keep watching this space to find out how it all develops…

Viva El Salvador

Abandoned Babies Part III - Interview

2010-11-04T09:28:00.000Z

Viva interviews Rogers Mbaziira, who works with our city-wide network CRANE in Kampala, Uganda. Part of Rogers’ job is to work with a group of network members – churches, homes for abandoned babies and other projects – that are committed to putting abandoned babies into local families. (Learn more about this group, called Families For Children.) That means lots of networking between projects and churches and families, with some interesting results. Go ahead, listen in...

Viva: Rogers, you have an amazing job. Can you tell us what your normal day looks like?

RM: I used to visit the foster families a lot, but now more of my time is spent on ‘mobilisation’. Most parents call in and some email FFC for advice. I spend most of my time replying to them, and often that involves referring them to different agencies or projects that can help. That’s why it’s so important to work as a network, because we have these other contacts we can put them in touch with.

Sometimes I go to meet the families, when they need to be visited or helped in any way. I visit babies’ homes to build relationships and to learn more what is happening there and link with them. That helps me to work better as a liaison between the families and the projects they adopt from.

The rest of the time I'm holding meetings with different groups to plan and think through adoption issues, plan for events and trainings like adoptive parents trainings... I also organise coffee mornings, pastors' breakfasts, training for social workers and probation workers and child rights advocates workshops.

Viva: Often it seems that adoption and foster care are not popular options in Uganda. Why do you think that is?

RM: Yes, it is true that so much stigma is attached to this area. People in Uganda see adoption as something for international people, and not for them. But there are different reasons people do not want to adopt. Some have excuses, like they’ve got a big family and are in charge of their relatives’ children. Big extended families in Uganda!

There are also cultural myths and beliefs about such children. Bloodlines are very important in Ugandan families. Many people believe these children have a curse, or that they may bring problems into their families because of the different blood.

Some of them prefer adopting girls, not boys, for reasons like boys are hard to manage and also in terms of bride price – it is the girl who brings that.

Some couples may be willing but other family members from the wider family refuse to let them adopt for these reasons. Others think that adoption is for the rich only.

Viva: With all this pressure, how does anyone ever decide to adopt?

RM: Well, some of them just lack information and they need to be sensitised more about adoption and foster care. We help do that. Some of them have come to us after being encouraged through our media campaigns, church mobilisaition and other meetings, when they discover that it is possible to adopt.

Viva: Tell us more about the media campaigns...

RM: Together with the babies’ homes we join hands and encourage the public about adoption through the radio, TV shows, newspaper articles. We also do this with adoptive parents and the government probation office.

Viva: You talk about church mobilisation - what does that look like?

RM: We now have a working group of more than five people doing the church mobilisation, visiting churches, doing small groups like men’s ministry, women’s groups, couples’ groups and other groups in churches just to encourage them to think about adoption. Actually, I had a great experience doing this myself this year.

I was on a prayer walk with Kampala Baptist Church, and I told one man Jacob about my work. After that he and his wife wanted more information about adopting and about life as an adoptive family, because many people don’t know about these things. Then they started the process of adopting a son, and we have been able to give them emotional support because we are in contact with many families who have already done all of these things.

It’s so good to work in the network because we know all these people in different projects, different parts of the city and also all the adoptive parents. For new parents, we can give them help by connecting them with these people. And for the projects that take abandoned babies, we can help them find each other and work together and find parents to adopt the babies. It is a very good job!

If you’d like to ask more questions about working with adoptive parents, or you know someone who would like to get involved with Families For Children, please email our Uganda office at africa@viva.org

Abandoned Babies Part II - Africa

2010-10-29T17:09:00.000+01:00

Working at Viva’s office in Kampala, I hear a lot about abandoned babies through the city-wide network, CRANE (we’re in the same office!) Nearly 200 babies are abandoned every year in Kampala alone, the capital city of Uganda. One lady I’ve met, Grace, has a special story about an abandoned baby though – Grace became a mother when someone else didn’t want her child.

Grace remembers falling in love with baby Nabulungi as soon as she met her in the hospital where she works. Nabulungi was tiny – a premature baby of only a kilogram – and the fact that her mother had abandoned her at the hospital made her seem even smaller. “Seeing her arrive to the world, so vulnerable and small, I bonded with this little one that needed so much attention and care,” recalls Grace.

For the first few weeks of Nabulungi’s life, Grace’s job was to care for her. She wasn’t sure where it would lead. As the time drew near for Nabulungi to leave the hospital, Grace couldn’t face the fact that ‘her’ tiny baby would be going into an institution… she needed a family home.

Adoption is a difficult path for a single woman in Uganda to take. Long talks went on with family and friends. Some of them were very much against the decision because they were worried that she would find it harder to marry and have the chance of her own family. But five months later, Grace bravely made the decision, supported by her mother and brother, to adopt Nabulungi. “Actually there was not much to think about really. Nabulungi needed a family and I just wanted to try and give her a happy life.”

The adoption process was challenging, but thankfully a working group from the city-wide network was able to help Grace. Projects that are part of the network who care for abandoned children have come together to set up the Families for Children working group. Their work is to find homes and families for children whose mothers couldn’t raise them, for whatever reason, and sadly had to abandon them in desperation.

Families for Children holds a regular coffee morning where adoptive families can meet, share experiences and stories and encourage one another. Grace started coming to these meetings and so loved the support she got from other parents who had chosen to adopt too. Because of the positive experiences she had at these coffee mornings, Grace says “I now want to adopt again and bless more children through adoption!”

In order to be the best parent for Nabulungi, she also attended the Adoptive Parents’ Training Course put on by Families for Children. Grace learned that adoption is a life-long process. She also learned how to tell Nabulungi she was adopted – a scary and difficult thing for any adoptive parent – and how to plan ahead and deal with other problems that often arise.

But for the moment those problems aren’t at the front of Grace’s mind. She tells me: “Every day is a new adventure and Nabulungi’s personality is very special. She is so expressive! I feel very blessed by the many expressions of her love; she is always showing me how much she loves me. She has given me much more, it’s amazing to arrive home and see her always happy, always waiting to see me, every day she gives me something new and beautiful. She is such a joy. I cannot imagine life without her.”

It is my hope that through Families for Children, and through all the amazing connections of the network, more of Kampala’s abandoned babies can find homes as loving as Grace’s.

~ R. in Kampala

Abandoned Children Part I - Latin America

2010-10-22T14:34:00.001+01:00

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/

Running for Their Lives

2010-10-11T13:10:00.000+01:00

Remember this? “Imagine walking down an alley in the red light district of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city – filled with brothels, karaoke bars and massage parlours. Lined up on each doorstep are countless pairs of shoes belonging to the women forced to work inside. Looking closer you can see that a sickening number of these shoes are very small, belonging to the little girls who are either being raised by prostitutes or have been forced to become sex workers themselves.”

Viva posted that back in May. But long before that my heart was broken by the hundreds of thousands of girls in Cambodia who are in this exact situation. I don’t even want to imagine it. But child sexual exploitation in Cambodia is something the world can’t avoid imagining. We need to be confronted with it, address it, end it, and then help to heal the girls who have gone through it.

That’s why three friends and I are running the New York Marathon this November: we’re running for their lives! Here’s the scene: four business men are aiming to raise £52,000 for Viva’s Doorsteps programme by running this marathon… and honestly, the training is so hard that I’m going to ask for more if we ever do it again! We’re looking for people who will sponsor us £1 per mile (£26 total, for those who aren’t good at maths or don’t know much about marathons.)

We’ve got Adam, who works for a production company; Matt, who is studying youth work; and Keith and me (Ian), both of us working in the financial services sector. We don’t agree on lots of things, but we do all agree that child sexual exploitation in Cambodia needs to end. And as professionals we know the value of working together and investing in communities. The Doorsteps programme is a great way to do that in Cambodia. It doesn’t just help girls who have been trafficked – it stops them from being trafficked to begin with.

Doorsteps is a programme that creates opportunities in Cambodian villages so that girls don’t have to turn to prostitution – and their families don’t have to sell them into brothels. Traffickers know which villages have the least opportunities, and they know which families are worst off. They target these villages and families, either offering young girls sham job offers in the big city or else paying off family ‘friends’ to bring the girls to a brothel. It’s hard to keep traffickers away, but what we can do is help alleviate the poverty that allows them to operate!

Together we’ve been helping set up vocational training programmes to teach teenagers a skill that will keep them employed and out of the sex trade. Doorsteps is also funding community income-generating projects like fish farms and mushroom nurseries. These are raising the economy of whole villages and helping ensure girls and their families have a solid income to rely on.

Part of the reason girls are targeted is their low status in Cambodian society. If someone has to make a sacrifice for the good of the family, it should be the least important person… right? Doorsteps is working with local churches, schools and community authorities to teach people about the intrinsic value of girls and help them learn that in a family, there is no least important person. These people are excited to learn how to protect their daughters from being trafficked into sexual slavery. Without the help and willingness of locals, Doorsteps could never work.

Adam, Matt, Keith and I aren’t all fit (though we’re getting there!). We’re running this crazy marathon because we believe Doorsteps is making a major difference in the lives of Cambodian girls. Where other projects focus on helping girls who have survived the trauma of Cambodia’s brothels and karaoke bars – which is a worthy mission – Doorsteps aims to break off the problem at its root. We all know that a goal is better achieved together. Ending child sexual exploitation is no different!

That’s why we’re inviting you to partner with us, as we partner with Viva, and Viva partners with the projects and churches that make up the Chab Dai network, and those projects partner with locals with the end result of preventing girls from ending up in brothels. We’re doing the leg work, can you come up with £26 to help us along?

To learn more or make a contribution, please go to http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserProfilePage.action?userUrl=runfatboyrunmarathon&isTeam=true.

~ Ian in Belfast

Join the Run Fat Boy Run Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=477813310857

Saved from Slavery... by a Sandwich Cart

2010-09-28T14:34:00.000+01:00

Veata’s family live in a village outside Phnom Penh. She’s 15 now, but she’s been working since she was 11. Veata, her mother, and her siblings work as trash collectors to earn money – three siblings work collecting trash while the other three attend school, and then they swap. Veata’s father is a construction worker.

A few years ago, Veata’s mother enrolled her in the Phnom Penh network’s ‘Get Ready’ programme, a project that keeps girls out of brothels by helping them develop skills that will help them get work. That way girls are educated but are still available to help their families earn money –a balance that is really necessary in poor Cambodian villages and families. (For those of you who don’t know, the network in Phnom Penh, called Chab Dai, is a group of projects that Viva helped bring together and continues to support, to prevent girls from being sold into sexual slavery in Cambodia.)

The staff of the network could see that Veata was a good student and a quick learner. She graduated from the Get Ready programme and was encouraged to continue with ‘Bright Girls’, through which she was given an allowance so she could take advanced English lessons. Veata spent two years in the ‘Bright Girls’ programme and became a skilled seamstress and tailor – even earning money above her allowance from the sales of her clothes!

Then the effects of the global financial crisis swept through Cambodia, and Veata’s father found his construction assignments growing fewer and farther between. Even with Veata’s sales and allowance and the hard work of her family collecting trash, there wasn’t enough money to cover the cost of living. They became prime targets for traffickers, who prey on families in financial straits.

A man approached Veata’s parents with an arrangement for her that could relieve them of the poverty that threatened: he said Veata would make a good candidate for a ‘second wife’. A wealthy Asian businessman was going to be spending time in Phnom Penh on business regularly through the year, and was looking for a young live-in mistress. The man offered Veata’s parents £125 up front, with monthly payments of £75 to follow. Although they hated the idea of parting with their daughter in this way, they were becoming desperate - that money could prevent the family from going hungry and possibly losing their home.

Veata went to one of the teachers from the Bright Girl programme for help. Because of the love and care the staff at Bright Girl had shown her, she knew she could trust them with this huge problem. She was immediately taken in to the weekly boarding programme supported by the network to be kept safe from the trafficker, while the network's social workers talked about alternatives with Veata’s family. They were able to arrange a £50 microbusiness loan for the family to set up a sandwich cart. This wasn’t as much as the trafficker was offering, but Veata’s parents were willing to take any option that would keep their daughter from becoming a ‘second wife’.

Veata stayed in the care of the network boarding programme until her family’s sandwich business was set up and she could safely return home. Within four months, she’d even paid off the microloan using her monthly allowance and the income from her sewing business!

Working together, we’ve seen Veata grow from a trash collector in tattered clothes, exposed to the dangers of child sexual exploitation, to a talented seamstress who can help support her family and earns more than most factory workers in Cambodia. And even better than that, her younger sisters are now safe from the danger posed by traffickers, as the microloan from the network has lifted their family out of poverty and created a business for all of them to benefit from.

Churches Rebuilding a Slum

2010-09-24T17:18:00.004+01:00

I am a bishop with the Assemblies of God church in the slum area of Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city. A year ago I attended one of Viva’s Vision Conferences, designed to get pastors involved in mobilising their churches to serve children in their neighbourhoods. In the local language we have a word, mabadkilio, that perfectly describes what’s happened to my ministry: it’s been completely transformed since this conference.

The slum I work in has 250,000 people, two-thirds of whom are under 18. The local government doesn’t provide any services in this slum: people have to leave the city to get health care, and water has to be carried in and sold because there aren’t reliable water pipes. As a result, the poorest often can’t afford to buy water. All the schools are on the outer edge of the slum, because of the high building density in its core. Most families in the slum have four to six people, and the majority of these families are in one-room houses. My church is one of ten operating in the slum.

The first thing my church did after this conference was to join with Viva and the city-wide network in Kisumu, called Arise for Children, and get involved in that community of Christians working on behalf of vulnerable children. I can’t explain how happy I am to be part of the network. All sorts of new opportunities have arisen because of my church’s membership; our church has grown markedly; and the neighbourhood is undergoing changes that are both deep and wide…

Changing children’s lives

We held a World Weekend of Prayer event at our church for the first time this year. This opened the gates for local children to start coming to church. Now we’re seen as ‘child friendly’ and lots of people want to be involved with us who weren’t even interested before!

In all my 37 years leading a church, I have never held a party for children. But through the network I learned of Viva Christmas Parties, a great way to give children a fun day and a gift while at the same time setting them up with any kind of long-term care they might need, either through us at the church, or through some of the other network members. When we held the Christmas party we also discovered how many children in our immediate neighbourhood are hungry… and after meeting them personally and spending a day together in celebration, we couldn’t let that continue. So this year my church has started a feeding programme on Sundays for the local kids. Again, when the parents see how we’re caring for their children, they want to come to church and find out why we do what we do. I never thought so much could come from a party!

Changing parents’ lives

Many children are poor because their parents can’t find jobs or can’t access the resources they need to start their own small business. (Most of the work in this slum is informal – people sell whatever products they can, or else perform tasks for others like taking them around on a bicycle.) After the Vision Conference my wife was inspired to start some women’s groups in our church, each one with a savings scheme – now, each month, a different woman has enough money to start a small business of her own. It has been wonderful to see these women given the resources, as well as the confidence, to provide for their children, and to see the children better fed and better educated as a direct result of these women’s groups!

The network also gave us an idea to start community gardens, and the church has been able to buy land and start a nursery garden, tended by 20 of our youth. Now they’re learning to earn a living by selling seedlings to locals and even people from far-flung neighbourhoods. This is especially encouraging since youth in the area are most likely to get involved in crime and drugs as they feel the pressure to make money and support themselves and their families, but can’t find work.

Changing the neighbourhood

Churches in our slum never used to work together or even reach out into the community. But at the Vision Conference, all the pastors from the area decided to organise community clean-ups. This has become a regular event, and we’ve even made an agreement with City Council so that now they actually come through and collect the rubbish. You can believe the difference it makes in a community when stinking garbage isn’t left to rot in the streets!

I just can’t get enough of the network. I want to publicly thank them for the encouragement they’ve given me to keep serving this community and its children! Our church is becoming an important part of the network too, and it’s a blessing to be able to return the favour to them. We’re helping train child ambassadors, we hosted the local World Weekend of Prayer event, we’ve attended Viva’s Child-Friendly Church training, and we’re on the network’s steering group. We are all so proud to be part of this movement that’s growing up in Kenya, all over Africa, and around the world, and I for one cannot wait to see how many lives it will touch.

~ Bishop Simiyu, Assemblies of God Church, Kisumu

To find out more about how city-wide networks help vulnerable children, visit http://www.viva.org/City-wide/

Children Stopping Child Abuse

2010-09-16T16:53:00.000+01:00

There are some moments in life you just can’t beat. Running around Cochabamba’s equivalent of the Houses of Parliament with kids from the Fundacion Emmanuel project (the ministry for children of prostitutes that I was telling you about in my previous post), campaigning for good treatment of children last week was definitely one of them.

Try saying this to twenty irrepressible children: “This is an important government building so you need to be good. Don’t run and don’t shout!” It just didn’t work. They went nuts, and who can blame them?

The Good Treatment vaccination campaign is all about children voicing their rights. They approach adults with recipe cards. On one side are the ingredients for good treatment of children: a bit of respect, understanding, a portion of humour, an abundance of tolerance, a piece of patience, and others. On the other side is a space for the recipient to write his or her name, sign and date – and voila! – they’re vaccinated. Along with the card and a leaflet, they receive a sweet.

The campaigning children were split up into groups of three. While one child was with a government official in one office, the other two would be racing upstairs to meet the next one. I couldn’t run and catch them to tell them to wait, because that would leave one behind alone. But I couldn’t shout after them because we would have been kicked out!

Despite the chaos it was a great opportunity. The kids loved running up to the important people who govern their city, campaigning for something they all recognise is of such crucial necessity to them.

It's a necessity because eight in 10 Bolivian children are abused where they should be most safe, right in their homes. This is the major underlying cause of child homelessness, and by extension, of child membership in gangs and child drug abuse. When children don't feel safe at home, they're likely to turn to the streets. The average life expectancy of a child on the street is only four years. That's why it's so important to advocate for child protection: when Bolivian adults recognise that child abuse isn't just part of growing up, children will feel safe at home. Good Treatment gets the word out and puts the power of advocacy into children's hands.

Last Wednesday was Good Treatment’s kick-off. To start, children and leaders from projects, churches and care organisations all over the city were all gathered in the Plaza Principal in the centre of Cochabamba. Then we fanned out to reach adults (including our government officials) all over the city. Thousands of children in other Bolivian cities are campaigning this month too. Throughout September the children will be holding events all over Cochabamba.

On top of their vaccination campaign, the children act and dance out the theme of protecting child rights. The adults are involved too: Daniel Cuaquira, the director of Early Encounter in Cochabamba (an exciting initiative of Viva and Toybox, helping kids and families on the streets), spent all day on the microphone in Plaza Principal getting people fired up about children’s rights, explaining the campaign and interviewing various people.

It’s always so uplifting to witness – and be part of – so many children’s projects working together toward the same goal. That’s the aim of the Viva-Toybox partnership. They’ve been working together to successfully roll out the Early Encounter programme here in Cochabamba, around Bolivia, and all over Latin America. With planning, prayer and financial support from Toybox and Viva’s expertise in implementing projects on the ground, the results have been extremely positive and bode well for the future of Latin America’s most vulnerable children!

Altogether it’s been a great start to the campaign, and everyone here in Cochabamba is pumped up and looking forward to the rest of the month. Viva el Buen Trato - long live Good Treatment!

~ Jonnie in Cochabamba

To learn more about how Viva is advocating for child rights, go to www.viva.org/advocacy

Read my personal blog at www.jonniewelford.blogspot.com

Switching it up - Police in for Child Questioning!

2010-09-13T16:18:00.002+01:00

On my first day in Kampala, I was taken to the Old Taxi Park. It was a dizzying maze of hundreds of small minibuses, known locally as matatus, and we were trying to find the one that would take me to my placement hosts. There is seemingly no system of getting in and out, and I was actually knocked by the side mirror of one as it was squeezing past us to get out. I remember thinking ‘What have I done? Where have I come to?’ My sales job in the UK was, a week after finishing up with the company, a lifetime away.

Yet a month later I had mastered the matatu system and there I was navigating my way to Stand Up Uganda, a community organisation that helps disadvantaged people, all by myself. The organisation is a member of Viva’s partner network in Kampala, the Children at Risk Action Network (CRANE). They told me “Pick a taxi at the matatu stage and then after the big junction look for the small white sign, after the garage and opposite the white building”. After passing what I assumed was the big junction, panic rose within me as I saw a garage, and then a white building and then another garage, and then a white shop… but then, looking across the road, that small white sign gleamed at me. I had made it!

I thought of that day as, now two years later, I was once again travelling to Stand Up Uganda, by coincidence the last children at risk project that I would visit in Uganda. On that first visit, Stand Up Uganda was nearing the end of the Viva Equip Projects course and I was hearing all about what they had learned in the most recent modules on financial accountability and project planning. The achievements of the organisation were many, but they wanted more help in child protection. They had written a policy but didn’t know where to start on changing patterns of child abuse in the community and were among a group of network members that had asked for more support in this specific area.

That was two years ago – this time, I am at Stand Up Uganda attending a network advocacy event that’s bringing together local children, the Mayor, the local council Chairman, the local Police Officer in charge of families and child protection and several other community members for a forum on protecting children as a community. It is so exciting to be able to hear the children confidently speak to their parents, local counsellors and police officers about abuse. Thanks to the advocacy programme of Viva and the network, children know their rights; parents know children’s rights; and local community elders are beginning to sit up and take notice. Listen in for a second…

Boy, 12: What are the challenges you face in implementing the law?

Police Officer: Parents don’t abide by the law, and the police need to be able to speak with them to change ways of neglect. Children keep quiet and don’t tell us openly what is going on so we can’t help them.

Boy, 12: What have you done to people who abuse children’s rights? Especially rich people. Some police are corrupt and just take the money.

PO: When we have a complaint, we always try to investigate and arrest them. This bribery shouldn’t happen but there are many departments in the police. If we find out, we do our best to refer to other police quarters. It is our duty to investigate and report properly.

Boy, 7: If a child just has one parent, and you arrest that parent for neglect, where do the children go?

PO: We’ll communicate with NGO organisations to help. The police first try to counsel your single parent so they know not to do it again.

Girl, 15: There was a child sacrifice suspect that was released (stated well-known name from press). Why was he released and what are you doing to stop these people?

PO: The law in a murder case states that you need to prove the crime beyond all doubt. Unfortunately the defence often pay the prosecution witnesses so the case is spoilt. Let us be strong-hearted in deciding on our cases and stick to the whole truth. That way, it is much easier for the police to prosecute.

Boy, 16: There are girls under 18 who are prostitutes in Kimbusa. How can you help them?

PO: Certainly the police won’t charge the girl with an offence. But also we want to be in partnership with more NGOs to help the girls. We need to combine our efforts to stop domestic violence in homes, and so we say with the Mayor present - let’s get together and look for ways to do more.

Girl, 11: But I know police officers engage in activities with those children.

PO: Is it true? Can you really identify one?

Child: They are the Special Police Constables.

PO: Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I will make a follow up with my supervisor on this. It cannot go on.

And so, my time as a Viva Volunteer has come to a close. But after this visit to Stand Up Uganda, I’m so happy! The dream of children’s voices being heard is becoming a reality through many similar advocacy events across Kampala, and I know Viva has future plans to support the network as together they work with the government, social workers, police officers and local counsellors as the profile of children’s rights is raised and securing child rights becomes a top priority in this country. It’s a shame I won’t be here to cheer on the team when it all happens, but you can be sure I’ll be watching and applauding from the UK!

~E. in Kampala

Do you want to volunteer with Viva? Visit www.viva.org/GetInvolved/

Saving Girls from Sexual Slavery

2010-09-09T12:36:00.001+01:00

You may have read my post about a trip to Nepal this summer when, along with six child care professionals in business suits, I travelled eight hours by bus and spent the night in a church, in order to attend an important graduation. (I might mention that on the way we saw a lorry tip off the road and get pulled up again by just five men with a rope and pulley – the power of working together!) Celebrating this graduation wasn’t the only thing I did in Nepal though. I also checked up on what’s happening with the Daughter programme, which is now being run by 145 churches around Nepal.

Girls reading the Daughter leaflet

Many people think of Nepal as a ‘shangri-la’ of mountains, centring around Kathmandu – a hippie haven filled with bright flags and colourfully dressed locals. Less popular with tourists and foreign imaginations are the southern plains that produce most of Nepal’s agriculture and border with India. It’s here that Daughter is having the biggest impact, because it’s here that children are taken from (or sometimes sold by) their families into bonded labour, circuses, and sexual slavery in India’s cities and Nepal’s brothels. What I have for you now are some stories about how Christians working together are saving real children from a life of slavery and abuse.

Pastor Surya, encouraged by the Viva Equip People course to start a church outreach to children at risk, organised a Daughter community meeting where 13-year-old Niru presented her story. Niru’s alcoholic father used to beat her mother so severely that her mother left and married another man – something that’s socially unacceptable in Nepalese culture. Niru was left to live at her grandmother’s house, where an uncle started molesting her last year. She fled the situation and returned to live with her mother, but her step-father refused to have her in the house. That was her situation when Pastor Surya heard her speak this spring… the whole audience was moved by her story. With the help of CarNet Nepal, our partner network of Christian organisations caring for children at risk in Nepal, Pastor Surya was able to take Niru right away to the appropriate transit shelter (a network member), where she’s been going through rehabilitation therapy and now wants to attend school! Thanks to Viva Equip People, the Daughter programme and the power of a network of Christian organisations, Niru doesn’t have to suffer anymore.

Many times, churches will hold Daughter meetings in their neighbourhoods. Children and mothers feel so safe at these meetings that they often come forward to admit abuses that have gone on in their homes. Often, though, the church isn’t ready to deal with the pressure of supporting these mothers and children emotionally and financially. They have the desire to care for them, but little expertise. That’s where Viva Equip People comes in, hand-in-hand with a broad network of well-trained organisations to share responsibility for the child’s wellbeing. Viva Equip People complements the desire to help with the knowledge of what to do.

This is just what happened in a church in south eastern Nepal. The church, a member of the Nepal network, held a Daughter forum for locals and found out about a girl being sexually abused by her father. When the church told the girl’s mother, she left the father immediately – a bold step, since single mothers have a heavy social stigma in Nepalese society. But where was she to go next? Working together as a network has enabled the church and other organisations to save the lives of this mother and daughter. They’re able to live in one of the member churches’ spare rooms, and earn money by catering for events held by the other churches and organisations in the network! One church alone couldn’t have provided a home and livelihood for this woman and her daughter; it took the combined efforts of several churches, compelled by the Daughter project to help women and girls at risk.

Daughter has been so successful in the city of Biratnagar that 25 churches have come together to form a child rescue group. Members of these churches go out into the city streets looking for children at risk of being trafficked. Many children in Nepal are separated from their families because of domestic abuse, alcoholism or poverty. When the church group finds them they are placed in a local Christian transit shelter, where they can stay until a family situation is arranged for them. Sometimes this means finding and contacting the natural family members and reconciling them with their children. Sometimes it means finding them a new family or a permanent care home. But it always means keeping them out of the hands of traffickers!

A group of pastors in one border district was able to intervene and prevent Asha, a girl who was in danger of being returned to her ‘husband’ in India. Asha’s parents divorced when she was seven, leaving her to live with her aunt. An uncle from India lured Asha south of the border with the promise of an education, and then sold her to be the wife of a man who sexually assaulted and tortured her. In February of this year she managed to escape and flee to her aunt in Nepal, but her ‘husband’ and uncle came to take her back. A pastor who was involved with Daughter heard of the case and intervened, bringing other pastors from the area to provide support. In the face of such opposition, the uncle and husband haven’t harassed Asha since.

Before the Daughter project came on the scene to unify churches to protect children from trafficking, churches were largely unaware of their responsibility – and opportunity – to reach out to vulnerable children in their communities. Now they’re taking huge steps to protect their local children from the dangers of trafficking, and are excited about how Viva Equip People training is helping meet the need they’re finding. We at Viva are so excited to be part of this revolution in child protection in Nepal, and can’t wait to bring Viva Equip People courses to Christians all over the country.

~ Ian, Viva Asia Co-ordinator

Learn more about the Daughter project at www.viva.org/Daughter/

Like Mother... Like Daughter?

2010-09-06T15:43:00.005+01:00

I’ve been volunteering with Viva in Bolivia for the last few months. (You may have seen my personal blog already.) I live with a local family in the city of Cochabamba, and work in different projects that are members of the Cochabamba network Viva set up with ongoing support from Toybox. So far the network is working out nicely for me because I get a taste of so many different kinds of projects and can really get a feel for how Christians are responding to children at risk in Bolivia.

One of the projects I’ve spent some time working in is a project called Fundacion Emmanuel that cares for the children of women involved in prostitution. This may sound like a very specific ministry, but these children have very specific needs. The project is open three days a week. They’d love to be available to the children every day, but they can’t afford it. They usually have 20 children a day, between six and 14 years old. There’s one boy and 19 girls! Good thing I was there to provide some male companionship.

The project serves lunch to the children as they’re arriving or leaving, depending on when they go to school. We help them with their homework, do a devotional together and provide toys and DVDs to play with (only once the homework is done!). The staff provides psychological support and helps the children deal with problems they have at home or school. I’ve noticed that the children tend to be shy, always respectful and thankful for the help they get.

Fundacion Emmanuel’s staff members also have relationships with the mothers, who are generally friendly and appreciate the care their children are receiving. Trying to arrange group meetings has been difficult as the women often haven’t come, so Goretty, the director of the project, visits each of them personally. The challenge is to convince the mothers that their lifestyle is having a negative impact on their children. Many of these women are from abusive backgrounds themselves, and the problem of abuse extends back many generations in most Bolivian families. (In fact, child abuse is prevalent in eight out of 10 families in Bolivia today.) To these women, growing up around prostitution and sexual abuse is often, sadly, just part of life.

Naturally, some daughters copy what they see their mothers doing; that’s what children do. They go to school and come to the project wearing provocative clothing like miniskirts, high boots and backless tops that their mothers buy for them. Because their mothers grew up in similar situations, there’s nobody to teach them that their bodies have a value that’s not monetary… so these little girls develop a taste for the clothes and the lifestyle of a sex trade worker. They’re growing up with the tragic mindset of a woman who believes her body is a commodity, rather than a temple.

All the children live within walking distance of the project. One day Goretty took me for a walk through the neighbourhood where the children live. It’s one of Cochabamba’s poorest districts. Filthy streets with rubbish dumped in heaps, a sickening sour smell from garbage that’s sat for weeks or months, dilapidated buildings, and listless homeless people are a few of the characteristics that stand out in my memory. ‘This is no place for little children to be growing up,’ I thought.

But of course there are hundreds of thousands in Bolivia, and millions of children around the world, growing up in similar neighbourhoods.

As we walked, I noticed women wandering through the lanes looking for clients. I’ve heard that it’s not uncommon for these women, many of whom are mothers, to bring clients into their homes while the children are there. As a result some of the children I worked with have been subjected to sexual abuse and physical violence from the clients. They’re also instilled with a sense that prostitution is a normal way of earning money. Boys can end up thinking it’s okay to visit prostitutes, and girls grow up believing prostitution is a viable job option for them.

The project is doing great work getting these children involved with children from other parts of town and from other projects. Being part of the Cochabamba network has allowed Fundacion Emmanuel to receive grants from Viva and its partners and to undergo the Viva Equip Projects training, so that it can provide better care to the children it helps. Viva also provides network-wide training sessions on specific issues that the staff of this project regularly attend. There’s a monthly meeting for the directors of all the network projects, where Goretty prays, studies the Bible, and receives encouragement from dozens of other directors. Sometimes it’s just good to know you’re not the only one fighting for children at risk.

The children are getting involved in Cochabamba network activities, too. They’re always involved in Viva’s World Weekend of Prayer, and this year they attended the huge gathering in Cochabamba’s stadium decked out in their own project t-shirts and banner, and marched through the city with thousands of other children involved in local projects.

They’re gearing up now to take part in September’s Good Treatment vaccination Campaign (an event put on by Viva’s Child Advocates), when thousands of children will ‘vaccinate’ tens of thousands of Cochabamba adults by having them sign forms promising not to abuse children. The adults are also encouraged to sign a petition about child rights, which will be presented to the government. I think it’s extremely important for these little girls (and boy!), being brought up right in the heart of the frightening and often abusive sex industry, to hear about and advocate for their own rights. Through the network and Child Advocates, they’re learning that they’re valuable people who have a right to respect and protection. They’re learning to fight for their future.

During my time in Bolivia so far I’ve realised that child abuse and neglect are deeply entrenched in the culture. But I’m seeing first-hand that a concerted effort between local projects, churches, and international partners can reverse Bolivian thinking about children, both in adults and in the children themselves. With the combined help of local adults and children, the support of local projects and churches, and the expertise and training provided by Viva, Bolivian cities are becoming friendlier places for children.

~ Jonnie in Cochabamba

Learn more about Viva’s work advocating for Bolivian children at www.viva.org/advocates.

Read my personal blog at www.jonniewelford.blogspot.com.

Viva at the All African Bishops Conference

2010-09-02T15:06:00.000+01:00

If you were paying close attention, you may have heard that 398 Anglican Bishops from dioceses all around Africa met from the 23rd to the 29th of August in Entebbe, just outside Kampala. The theme for this All Africa Bishops Conference was ‘Unlocking Potential and Securing our Future’. Viva was invited to share a stall with World Vision representatives at the conference, and as Viva’s Regional Director for the Africa region, I took up the challenge.

It was a great opportunity to bring the issues facing Africa’s children to the attention of the Anglican Church, and right on topic: we at Viva happen to believe that children are the key to unlocking potential, and the embodiment of our future! It seems they listened. In their Conference Statement, released at the end of the conference, the bishops added a little something proposed by Viva and World Vision:

“The children and the youth are the embodiment of the future and the church seeks to unlock the inherent potential in this generation. Therefore, the Church in Africa commits itself to providing biblical upbringing of children and youth and give a special attention to their needs and rights.”

Over half of the people in Africa are under 18, and this is reflected in many African churches. It is obvious that children must be invited, included and taken seriously if the church is truly interested in ‘unlocking potential’. Children must be a priority for churches because there are many of them, they are strategically important (most people become Christians as children), and they are in need.

Thankfully the Church – Anglican and otherwise – is the best-placed institution to bring help and care to children at risk. There are churches in most communities in Africa. These churches tend to have huge influence in their communities: on local authorities, adults in the congregation, and even governments. The church can mobilise adults to care for and respect children in a more deep and impactful way than any other institution. It can also often provide a venue for physically caring for children, as buildings and playgrounds are available during the week.

Church pastors and members of the congregations know what’s going on in their neighbourhoods; they know because they’re living and working there, and because locals trust them with their problems. So they have the unique gift of knowing exactly what needs are waiting to be met, even more intimately than local governments might.

All of this means local churches know which children are most at risk and are in a position to help them.

At the All Africa Bishops Conference Viva challenged these powerful religious leaders to prioritise the holistic wellbeing of children. That means caring not just for the child’s soul, but also his or her physical needs, dealing with emotional trauma, helping provide education, and doing everything possible to make sure children have families. Too often churches offer a Sunday school programme and not much more… Viva is trying to change that! (See our blog on the Child-Friendly Church.)

To start on this path of holistic wellbeing, we encouraged the conference attendees to plan budgets with children in mind, develop strategies to protect children such as child protection policies, pray for the specific needs of children, and forge partnerships with other churches and organisations in their communities to provide better, more complete care to vulnerable children.

Part of our strategy was to provide CDs and resources on children’s ministry in our Viva-World Vision stall at the conference venue. We handed out cards encouraging bishops and other attendees to pray for children for one minute every day, and shared a checklist of things that make up a Child-Friendly Church. But the best part was when the representative from World Vision was able to share with the bishops as a speaker, after which my 9-year-old daughter and her friend came forward to take the hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, as a symbol and challenge for the church to care for and nurture children. The girls then spent the rest of their time at the conference handing out prayer cards to all the bishops.

In his opening speech the Archbishop of Canterbury said this:

“Our focus is quite rightly on the nature of this new life and of those changes that God desires – our focus is on our responsibility to bring healing, justice (and sometimes judgement too), to bring hope where there is none…”

We agree. The Church, no matter what denomination, has a responsibility to bring healing, justice and hope to the societies of the world, because that’s what God intends for every man, woman and child! Today, children are in the most need; they’re also the fastest-growing segment of the global population. I can’t wait to see how these African bishops get back into their communities and congregations and start changing life for the world’s most vulnerable children.

~ Isobel, Viva Africa Regional Director

To read the rest of the Conference Statement please go to www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk

You Voted for it: Helping Pakistan Heal

2010-08-27T13:28:00.000+01:00

Last week Viva posted a poll asking our readers who they think should aid Pakistani flood victims. Because we allowed you to pick more than one option, the results sound funny:

66% thought wealthy governments should respond to the flood;

53% said international non-governmental organisations should be providing aid;

80% thought the global church has a responsibility to help;

and 73% voted that local agencies should respond.

It's interesting to note that in no case did 100% of people agree on an answer: not everybody thinks rich governments have the responsibility; and we don't all agree that the global church should respond either. Maybe this helps explain why the international response to the disaster has been so slow.

At Viva, we believe that the response to any disaster - be it a monstrous flood in Pakistan or the industry of child sexual exploitation - requires a concerted response from governments (wealthy and local), international NGOs, local projects, and the global and local church. In fact, we can't see how any problem facing children at risk can ever be solved without such widespread collaboration.

In the case of these floods, governments are required (including local governments) to keep law and order. It’s in the best interests of every country to keep the people of Pakistan safe and healthy, especially given how close they are to densely-populated India, China and Iran. Wealthy governments should be jumping at the chance to support Pakistan monetarily right now, and the governments of poor countries should be showing solidarity.

International disaster-response NGOs don’t usually need to be asked to help; it’s the reason they exist. In that sense they necessarily have the responsibility to help. While Viva doesn’t provide disaster aid, many of our larger partners do… and they’ve been hard at work bringing relief to Pakistan’s flooded people from the beginning of this calamity.

In our opinion, the global church is the institution with the greatest responsibility to care for those who need help. As God’s representatives to the world, Christians are called to love our neighbours, care for widows and orphans, fight for justice, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and visit the sick. All of these things need doing right now in Pakistan. Whether it’s congregations taking up offerings for aid to Pakistan, or churches sending teams of specialised aid workers from within their congregations, or even local Pakistani churches offering asylum and support to people in their communities who have lost everything… the global church must be involved in bringing Pakistanis back to their feet and revealing God’s love to them.

Local agencies in Pakistan are the ones least prepared to respond to this disaster, yet they’re also the ones that will deal with it in the long term. Orphanages, feeding centres and local clinics will literally be inundated with children (and adults) in the coming months and years as the devastation takes root and its full effect is felt. They’ll need to be prepared to deal with trauma, raise their own funds, and organise their staff to allow for equal work distribution and sufficient time for rest. Workers will have to be trained in child protection as children without families to keep them safe are at higher risk.

That’s where Viva can help. By making it possible for these local agencies to work together with local and international churches and international NGOs, we can turn these little agencies into centres of Christian care for Pakistan’s children at risk. By providing the training these projects and churches need to protect children and develop good governance, we’re giving them what they need to continue helping heal Pakistan long after the floodwaters subside.

In fact, it’s what we’re already doing. Our network in Pakistan has already been at work advocating on behalf of vulnerable children and engaging churches and project workers in prayer together. As they share resources and information, they’ll be better prepared to deal with the flow of vulnerable children to Pakistan’s cities.

Why Does a Zebra Cross the Road?

2010-08-25T11:51:00.002+01:00

To keep children safe, of course!

This summer dozens of children from Viva's network of projects in Kampala, Uganda took to the streets - one street in particular - to engage in community advocacy. What does that look like? This:

Roads in Kampala can be difficult even for grown-up pedestrians to navigate, especially in poorer areas where most children at risk live. Just crossing the street can be a life-threatening activity for a child in these neighbourhoods! So a few projects put their heads together and decided to make their neighbourhood safer for the children in their care and those living in the area. They painted a zebra crossing.

Donning safety vests, these children took turns painting the stripes of the crossing and handing out lollipops and leaflets - taking advantage of the traffic caused by their work to teach passing drivers and pedestrians about child rights and child protection.

This was a great way for children to make new friends, learn to advocate for themselves, and take responsibility for the safety of their neighbourhood. We're hoping to bring more zebra crossings to other neighbourhoods throughout the city!

Take a look at the rest of the pictures on Viva's Facebook page.

A Step Towards Friendship?

2010-08-24T11:11:00.000+01:00

Last week Viva posted a blog about the effects a government's decisions can have on on its country's children, refering to Pakistan's consideration of India's £3.2 million aid offer. Though the two countries have been at odds for the last 63 years, we hoped that this could be a turning point in their relationship.

So we were very pleased to hear that on Friday Pakistan did accept India's offer of aid, despite the history of conflict between the nations, and we hope the money will be put to use to directly benefit flood victims, especially those most vulnerable - the children. Viva is continuing to support the amazing ongoing work of the local projects and churches that make up our networks in Pakistan and India, as well as that of our international partners working to bring relief to those who have lost everything in the floods.

Let Your Light Shine

2010-08-23T13:01:00.010+01:00

How do you dispel the damaging myths surrounding HIV and AIDS? How do you teach communities that children suffering from HIV or AIDS didn't do anything to deserve it? What's the best way to make sure children living with or orphaned by HIV or AIDS get the most loving care and support?

I’ll tell you – Let Your Light Shine.

Given its name because it's all about helping kids to realise their value and live in the light of it, Let Your Light Shine is a video-based tool that helps train caregivers to provide better care for children suffering from or affected by HIV and AIDS. Suffering from this disease comes with heavy stigma in Africa, where many people don't have correct facts about the causes and spread of HIV and AIDS. As a result, many children who have been orphaned by AIDS or are living with it themselves are kept out of school or treated differently by the people who should be taking care of them.

Let Your Light Shine is being used to dispel myths about AIDS among caregivers. It also teaches caregivers how to provide the special love and support that these children require, and how to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS. When one or two people from a church, local project or other non-governmental organisation are trained in Let Your Light Shine, they're encouraged to go teach others in their field how to care for children suffering from HIV and AIDS too.

Viva's networks across Africa are the perfect way to get Let Your Light Shine training into many hands at once. In June Viva posted a blog about how Let Your Light Shine took off in Uganda - from one training session where 58 people were trained, more than 1000 adults learned to care for children affected by HIV and AIDS.

A Viva network can advertise to a specific group of projects and churches that care or children, and it can use representatives of its member projects to teach workers from other projects who couldn't attend the training. You could say it's like the 'grapevine'. Before long, thousands of extremely vulnerable children are benefiting from the training those 58 people received from Viva.

Picture this: one man attends Let Your Light Shine training with Viva. He goes back to his office at AIDS Care Education and Training (ACET) in Zimbabwe, where he teaches his co-workers what he learned. ACET holds a Let Your Light Shine training for 20 more pople These people represent 10 different projects in the area. That's 10 projects filled with children who will directly benefit from their caregivers' new knowledge!

And it doesn't stop there; those 20 workers will keep telling other people. And those people will tell other people. And so it goes on. The 20 people who attended ACET's training session had only one complaint: that they couldn't get enough of the information in one day and they wanted more time! They'll be attending three more training days throughout the year.

Each person who attends a Let Your Light Shine training session with Viva has a similar story. It's spreading through Tanzania, South Africa, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia...

The great thing about Let Your Light Shine is that it gives child care workers the skills and information they need to protect and care for children suffering from HIV or AIDS and their effects. And the great thing about networks is that they let these trained caregivers pass on their knowledge to one another, multiplying the investment put into the original training. Networks make caring for children more efficient and more comprehensive. We're seeing this in action as Let Your Light Shine spreads across more and more African cities, helping more and more children to let their lights shine!

Learn more about Viva's work with children with HIV and AIDS at www.viva.org/Shine

When do neighbours become good friends?

2010-08-19T13:22:00.002+01:00

If you saw two children arguing – yelling, calling names, sulking – you’d want to intervene. An adult can pull two children apart and talk sense into them. But when two nuclear-armed countries are behaving that way, nobody can really do anything about it. That’s the situation neighbours India and Pakistan are in today.

We’ve all heard about the devastating floods that have ravaged Pakistan this month. You may not have heard that many parts of northern India have been stricken by floods too, with hundreds killed (including 18 young children who were killed when their school collapsed under heavy rains yesterday in Dehradun).

3.5 million children are estimated to be at risk of contracting water-borne diseases in Pakistan because of the floods. Their parents have lost their livelihoods; their homes have been washed away; and their friends or family members may have been killed. India has offered $5 million (about £3.2 million) in aid money to Pakistan, but because of longstanding political and military clashes and a deep mistrust of its giant neighbour, the government of Pakistan has not yet accepted and is still considering the offer.

Some have complained that India’s offer of aid was shamefully delayed (just last Friday), and that the amount is somewhat paltry given the scale of the damage. Although perhaps given the climate of mistrust and ongoing conflict, as well as India’s own natural disasters, the timing and size of India’s offer isn’t really surprising.

So the question is this - does a government, whose employees and ministers are largely safe in flood-free zones, have the right to pick and choose what aid it will receive when millions of children’s lives are at stake? Now I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know all the intricacies of government relations. But I do know that we need to pray that Pakistan will accept the aid and put it to good use right away. Some countries will just never get along. But it would be terrible if that led to a missed opportunity to bring desperately needed aid to children at huge physical risk. As is so often the case, disagreements between governments are resulting in a direct impact on vulnerable children.

The conflict between India and Pakistan goes back to 1947 when the Indian subcontinent endured the trauma of being partitioned into two states: one mainly Hindu, and one a homeland for Indian Muslims. In the rush to move from India to Pakistan (or the other way) 12 million people were forcibly uprooted, many of them killed. Since then the two countries have fought three major wars, and officials on both sides continue to treat one another with suspicion.

Please pray for the softening of the hearts of both India and Pakistan’s governing officials. This could be a chance for India and Pakistan to start rebuilding their relationship. In fact, it has many parallels to aid given between Turkey and Greece – two countries that traditionally aren’t friends – when earthquakes struck both countries in the summer of 1999. Both governments generously extended aid to the citizens of the other, and both countries were humble enough to accept it.

Viva has six thriving networks across India that help thousands of the country’s most vulnerable children. With the help of local churches and the cooperation of Indian authorities, we’ve been able to start challenging Indian culture to be more mindful of children’s rights and to place higher value on girls in particular. We have also been working to further develop our network of Christian projects and churches in Pakistan to respond to the ongoing needs of children. In the aftermath of the flooding, these agencies will be able to provide the care, physical and emotional support, and medical attention many of the young victims will need.

Providing that ongoing care, long after media attention and flood waters subside, will require real partnership, real relationship. So let’s pray that these two governments can put aside their historical differences and become more than just neighbours. Let’s pray that they will actually work together to change the situations of the vulnerable children within their countries.

For more information on what we are doing across Asia see http://www.viva.org/asia.aspx

Kids Caring for Kolkata

2010-08-16T11:57:00.000+01:00

With more than 15 million people crammed into its metropolitan area, Kolkata is India’s third-largest city. It’s also one of the fastest-growing, with new migrants arriving to look for work every day. ‘Informal labour’ makes up nearly half of Kolkata’s economy – roadside hawkers, rag pickers, and other people who don’t have a guaranteed income each day. A third of Kolkata’s residents live in slums. No wonder Mother Teresa picked Kolkata to live in and serve the poor.

Recently 45 children from Christian projects working in these slums came together for a one-day workshop called “Why should we have rights?” In areas like Kolkata’s overpopulated slums, the needs of children often get overlooked or pushed aside for more pressing matters like feeding the family or finding a proper latrine (normally impossible). But that doesn’t mean these children’s rights aren’t just as important of those of kids in the developed world, or in the richer parts of Kolkata. And that’s just what they learned.

Viva’s city-wide network in Kolkata designed the workshop to bring children from many different projects to meet new friends, and together come up with new ideas on how to advocate for child rights to the adults in their community. We don’t just want adults running the show in our networks – though of course properly trained adults are essential to running a good project, church or network! Viva believes the ones with the most at stake, the children, have ideas and valuable opinions that need to be heard too.

The first activity was a “theatre of the oppressed”, a doleful name for a doleful activity. The children got into groups and composed skits to demonstrate in a dramatic sense the way children are oppressed or denied their rights in the slums. Seeing their peers act out misery that’s a daily occurrence for some of these children or their friends helped to solidify their desire to improve life in Kolkata’s slums.

It was important for us to make sure the children knew the difference between rights and desires. While every child has the right to be fed, they don’t have the right to eat ice cream every day! This sparked some interesting and thoughtful discussions about the limits of rights, a topic that’s often ignored when children’s rights are the topic of conversation.

After this the children watched a film about a slum child living in India’s largest city and financial capital, called “Salaam Mumbai”. We had prepared a range of discussion topics on this issue too, but they were hardly necessary. Most of our attendees could identify with the main character – the difficulties of living in run-down houses with no running water or sanitation, avoiding street crime, dealing with discrimination, and watching their parents try desperately to come up with money to feed them (if they have parents at all) aren’t strange experiences for these kids.

The afternoon easily rolled on into a session on the issues facing all the areas where our delegates came from. Children living in Kolkata’s slums regularly brave everything from streets filthy with excrement, to harsh forms of sexual discrimination, to being kept out of school to beg – on a daily basis. Obstacles to proper human development differ based on the slum you live in. Some slums have more problems with disease; others are rife with brothels and the dangers of trafficking; others are more likely to see children sucked into forced labour on the streets as beggars and in the dumps as rag-pickers. Having the children talk about these things is a great way to generate ideas about how to stay safe from them, or even overcome them completely!

In the end, the experience was so helpful that the children took the initiative to form an ongoing group, which they named Care Youth Group. They’re planning to meet every three months to hatch plans to better their communities, advocate among adults and community leaders for the rights they learned about, and improve the situations in the projects they represent. Just like in Uganda and Bolivia, Viva’s busy harnessing the power of children using their creative geniuses together, in order to permanently change their neighbourhoods!

One of the best things about this workshop was that it didn’t just help the kids make new friends and come up with ideas. It also gave them the confidence to stand up for themselves in a positive and constructive way, something they don’t easily learn in the slum environment. I can’t wait to see what they come up when they have their first three-month meeting.

~ Steven, Viva India Network Co-ordinator, Kolkata

Learn more about child advocacy at www.viva.org/advocates

You voted for it: Child-Friendly Churches

2010-08-12T12:11:00.004+01:00

In last week's poll we asked you how child-friendly your church is. About two thirds said their church was "Very friendly!" and the other third thought theirs was "Pretty friendly". But what actually makes a church child-friendly?

Viva believes a child-friendly church is one that treats children as an integral part of its congregation, and where children are invited and encouraged to worship and serve just the same as adults (but with a child-friendly twist). Programmes like Sunday school are great for teaching children about God, but Sunday school can't be the only thing a church offers its children.

We also believe that in order for a church to be child-friendly, it needs to be safe for children of all ages. That means the buildings themselves need to be made safe, and also that churches need to have and implement child protection policies, and train staff to care for and protect children.

Churches have a responsibility not only to care for the children who worship in their buildings, but also for the children who live and play in their neighbourhoods. This could look like after-school programmes for local kids with working parents, or a volunteer-run kitchen for children whose parents can't afford to provide them with breakfast (like our feeding centres in Costa Rica).

So... do you still rate your church child-friendly? Although a Viva Child-Friendly Church is usually found in Africa, churches in the developed world have a duty to be child-friendly too. Western Christians can't fall prey to complacently thinking their church is child-friendly just because it offeres programmes for children. Every grown-up member of a church congregation needs to be vigilant in ensuring their church is taking care of its children and including them in all of the best ways.

If you have ideas for making churches child-friendly, or examples of how your church loves its children, please let us know on our Facebook page.

Children Fighting Bad Treatment

2010-08-09T16:11:00.007+01:00

The Child Advocates are getting down to business. Recently 61 of our Bolivian child ambassadors and youth leaders met in Cochabamba for their 6th Annual Meeting, a weekend of planning, leadership activities, devotions, and of course a talent show.

Viva’s Child Advocates (Protagonismo Infantil in Spanish) have been causing a stir around Bolivia. Their Good Treatment campaign ‘vaccinated’ more than 28,000 adults against child abuse this year, and the advocates themselves are often arranging interviews with radio hosts, television programmes and government authorities to get word out about treating children properly and respecting child rights.

Viva’s city-wide networks throughout the country provide the platform for these little leaders to get together and talk about successes, plan out strategies and events, and learn from one another – at neighbourhood, city and national levels.

The most recent meeting was one of the national ones. Viva arranged for 61 child ambassadors, between the ages of 10 and 16, from projects all over the country to meet so they could motivate and encourage one another and strengthen the role of children in their cities. These leaders represent the foster homes, orphanages, street children outreach ministries, and other organisations that care for them; they were elected by their peers on the basis of their personal gifts and leadership skills. Their mission was to plan the national strategy for the next five years. This is what they came up with:

September 2010-2011: Action against child abuse
September 2011-2012: Campaign against child labour exploitation
September 2012-2013: Anti-abortion campaign
September 2013-2014: Child abandonment awareness campaign
September 2014-2015: Action against child trafficking

Sound a bit heavy for a bunch of children? They think so too, and that’s why they’re fighting so hard to end these issues that many Bolivian children deal with every day. Children can – and should be – key players in ending violations of their rights.

They’ll continue to use the tactics they’ve tried and proven over the last six years –thousands of vulnerable children marching through the city streets, holding huge prayer rallies, and broadcasting their message through media, churches and schools. They will doubtless come up with new ways of pressuring Bolivia’s adults, too!

The weekend was filled with planning sessions, leadership workshops, lectures and devotions. The child ambassadors were able to learn from one another of different issues that are challenging children around Bolivia. But it’s not just good for them – “Our intention is to give training and education to these children leaders so they can also reach other children, keep them informed and motivated to make positive changes,” says the network office.

Amanda, the ambassador representing one of the projects in Oruro, said of the weekend, “The devotional time was very good, it made us think and motivated us to do more things, because we can do everything through Christ who strengthens us! In the workshops we talked about good treatment issues. In this meeting we exchanged ideas to make things more interesting and also it helped us to know each other more.” The ambassadors discussed how they could use images to educate and inform their neighbourhoods – so Bolivians should be on the lookout for giant colourful Child Advocates posters popping up around the country!

It wasn’t all hard work though. Our child advocates also had a talent show, performing songs, comedy acts, dances and dramas for one another and generally behaving like children … something vulnerable kids in Bolivia don’t always get the chance to do. Following that they watched a great cinematographic masterpiece: ‘Karate Kid 4’!

The projects, children, networks, communities and families surrounding these intrepid children are waiting to see what new and creative ways they’ll come up with to protect the rights of children. We at Viva are so proud to see these children, so undervalued by their society, coming together to change their whole culture.

Viva Bolivia

Learn more about Child Advocates at www.viva.org/advocates

Child-Friendly Church

2010-08-05T16:15:00.000+01:00

I’ve been living in Uganda for two years now. Working with Viva, I meet lots of pastors and am always in contact with local churches. I love my church here, it’s filled with people who truly want to be there together, are really excited about worshiping God and serving their community.

But the Ugandan church, just like everywhere around the world, suffers from contrasts in faith, actions and beliefs. What do you see when you picture an African church? Maybe a building without walls or with a thatched roof … maybe a bunch of colourfully dressed people singing under a tree, raising their hands and swaying with African enthusiasm. The reality is that African churches are unique in their own way, but also very similar to churches everywhere else.

My church in Kampala is very family-oriented. Through the week we have activities for all sorts of different groups: children, students, support for people with HIV. Unlike back home in the West, people at my church here actually hang out at church during the week. It’s just a fun place to be, it’s safe and it’s a bright social scene. That would be hard to find in the UK! People here go to church regularly – something that’s been lost to the last few generations in the West. I’m always excited to see that bit of culture alive and well in Africa.

Tragically, the same old problems that have plagued the Western church for hundreds of years also exist here – but with a special African flair. Pastors in Uganda get a lot of respect, which opens up a door for those who are corrupt to use their office to make money or influence people in ungodly ways.

In some cases, pastors are notorious for demanding money before they’ll pray for someone. Imagine being a child in an impoverished family, your mother has AIDS, you invite your local pastor to pray for your sick mother, and before he starts he asks for money you don’t have! What image would that give you of God?

Another widespread practice in many churches is ‘demon casting’. This is a reverberation of the traditional witch doctor culture here, that’s been grafted into the church. In my first home here I woke up in the middle of the night to chanting and screaming: a midnight ‘church’ service where demons were being cast out! I was scared and I’m grown up … I can’t imagine being a child and seeing these things go on in my church.

Of course the Ugandan church can’t be summed up by me, and it definitely can’t be summed up in a blog post. But I’m in a special position to see how churches here can be made more child-friendly.

Lots of churches don’t have programmes for children, and they’re just expected to sit through the service. A Sunday school programme, which we take for granted back home, would be a great idea for the kids.

Ugandan churches really do want to help children at risk. But this is often seen as an expenditure that they simply can’t afford. There are easy ways churches can reach out to children in their communities around here though, like having after school clubs or Bible study groups, or a children’s prayer ministry. Their human capital is the best thing they’ve got going, and they need to use it!

I’m so happy Viva is in a special position to help these churches reach their full potential of reaching out to children. We’ve been able to train church leaders and workers in child protection, and our networks are always coming up with ideas and new ways of mobilising congregations to help kids in their communities. It’s up to the churches themselves to take the initiative and use what Viva’s given them to change their entire community.

The church is the best placed organisation in the whole world to help millions of children at risk. I’m privileged to be working for Viva as it helps to support churches across the continent to do just that. Thanks to our unique networks of projects, churches and NGOs across Africa we can help every church become a Child Friendly Church.

~ F. in Kampala

Visit www.viva.org/what to find out more about how we help children at risk in Uganda and around the world.

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You voted for it: Caring for Workers

2010-08-04T15:45:00.003+01:00

In last week's poll we asked you what child care workers need most. Of course the people who care for vulnerable children need many more things than what we listed, but if we started including things like 'malaria pills' you'd never be able to choose.

6% of our readers thought child care workers need more money,

68% thought they need better training,

and 25% of you thought they need a vacation.

You're all right. Although it sounds materialistic to say child care workers need more money, they certainly do! Not only for themselves, but simply to run the projects properly. Many of the projects Viva works with are just generous people who open their homes to orphans, or give their time to care for disabled children. They try to stretch their income to cover the costs and elicit donations from others in their community, but funds are usually hard to come by.

Although people caring for children have the best intentions, they are often propelled by passion and not by proper training. Training can teach them how to protect children's rights and person, detect signs of abuse, create an environment that encourages children to voice their opinions, and provide counselling for children who need it.

A vacation is something else these wonderful people desperately need! Many of the thousands of people who devote their lives to caring for the children around them are so busy doing just that, that they never take time for themselves. Work starts with making breakfast before the children wake up, and ends when the last one has gone to bed. Workers often burn out and are tempted to give up altogether.

That's why Viva Equip People is such a blessing - it addresses these three great needs and helps workers overcome them. Through this course child care workers in developing countries receive training they need to properly care for children, learn how to run a financially accountable project and raise funds for themselves, and even have the chance to go on a spiritual retreat to gather their strength and renew their focus. The workers benefit, the children benefit, and everything is run more efficiently. Through Viva Equip People project workers are also able to meet people from other projects in their area, giving them important new contacts who can support them by sharing financial resources, encouraging them, and sharing knowledge.

To learn more about Viva Equip People go to www.viva.org/QualityCare/

A New Generation of Slum Children

2010-08-02T14:47:00.000+01:00

As a Network Consultant for Viva India, one of the best parts of my job is visiting the networks Viva works with and seeing what all the projects are doing. Recently I was on a whirlwind tour of India, travelling from Bangalore in the south to Vijayawada in the southeast, and then all the way up to Dehradun in the Himalayas, and finally back to Delhi where I work. It helped me to remember what a huge, diverse and beautiful country India is … but also how much work there is to be done.

I’d like to share some good news from Dehradun. This is one of India’s oldest cities and is home to half a million people today. It’s snuggled between the feet of the Himalayas and the vast plains of northern India, surrounded by the Ganges and Yamuna rivers. Imagine coming from the hot Indian plains and arriving in a place surrounded by forests, mountains and cool rivers! Or, if you like wildlife, you could look around for tigers, snow leopards, cheetahs, or Himalayan bears.

Despite its idyllic setting, Dehradun has its share of slums and poverty. The people living in the slums are largely migrants who have had to resort to begging and rag-picking, and who can rarely allow themselves the luxury of thinking about an education for their children. As a result, about 50% of the slum children never attend school, and those who do typically drop out or else fare badly in their classes.

Part of the problem is that the children have to go out and beg or look for scraps, to supplement their parents’ income. Those who aren’t sent out to work are kept in to work in a different way, taking care of the house or their younger brothers and sisters. Often girls are given the very dangerous task of going into the hills, which are inhabited by all the exotic animals I mentioned before, to collect firewood. Whatever they’re up to, the children are certainly not in school.

That’s why our network of projects in Dehradun has started an evening tutoring programme in the slums. It started up in June, and it already has 100 students! Rather, they have 100 students - there are actually four different tutoring classrooms, one in each of Dehradun’s four slum districts. Each classroom has a small library, and classes are held for two hours every weekday evening. We hold them late in the day so that any child can come – whether they’ve been at school during the day and need help with their homework (hard to get from often uneducated parents), or whether they’ve spent the day looking for scraps around town.

Running these classes together has had a great effect not just on the children attending, but also on the projects running them. The network is being strengthened by this process of working together so that now individual projects are learning more about one another, and how they can both support and be helped by others working in their community.

I met up with the leaders of these classrooms when I was in Dehradun. It was so uplifting to hear their stories – how against all the odds they’ve been able to establish not just one but four classrooms throughout the city, assemble a committee of locals to supervise the teachers and the students, and pull together enough material for four libraries … all with the budgets and time constraints of churches and orphanages.

There are 20 million children in India who are not in school. The problem is much bigger than just Dehradun. Wherever there’s poverty or sexual discrimination, there are children kept home to work, or sent into the cities to beg, or forced into bonded labour. Against such a problem, I feel terribly small! But it’s not just me working against this current. There are thousands of people and projects in India, big and small, working to bring children a better future. How much more can we do if we come together? We can share resources, receive training together, share information, and create rules and best practices to operate on. More children would receive better help, where and when they needed it.

Living in India myself and seeing the scope of the problem firsthand, I know that the only way the problem will ever be solved is through the united efforts of those who care about children. That’s why Viva’s city-wide networks of projects and churches are the perfect way to bring help and love to children at risk. As for these Dehradun tutoring classes, the best part is not just that the children are getting some education. It’s that they’re being shown, in a very practical way, that they have value – they are valuable enough for many adults to give up their time and energy to educate and care for them. With that knowledge, they’re being encouraged not just to accept what life has given them, but to strive for great things. What better education is there than that?

~ Steven Christian, Network Co-ordinator, Viva India

Interested in how city-wide networks are brought together? Visit http://www.viva.org/City-wide/

Find out how the Asha Forum is improving the lives of India’s children at http://www.viva.org/Asha/

Finding Asuncion's Most Vulnerable Kids

2010-07-30T12:34:00.001+01:00

Last week I told you about a Vacation Camp being run through Viva’s network of projects and churches in Asuncion, Paraguay. At the beginning of the week it was so cold that the kids weren’t leaving their homes, and we had fewer campers than we’d expected. But our teenaged volunteers from two local projects – a day centre for youth suffering the effects of HIV/AIDS and a care home – braved the chilly streets and invited local kids to come join us for the rest of the week. On Monday we had 30 children. By Thursday we had more than 100 children and 40 teenagers!

On the surface, the goal of Vacation Camp was to warm up the local children during the week’s winter holiday, and give them something to do. In the impoverished neighbourhoods where our network of projects and churches operate, many homes don’t have heating. Even if they did, the parents can’t afford enough fuel to keep the house warm all day. On top of that, parents have to work every day just to feed and house their children, and paying for day care is out of the question. Hundreds of children spend their holidays sitting in a freezing house, bored, unable to go out because the streets are so dangerous.

This goal we did achieve! As you may have read, it was a week of sports training, football games, entertainment, arts and crafts, dancing, and tasty hot snacks. The kids had a blast, their parents didn’t have to worry about them, and everyone made new friends.

Our underlying mission was to get these vulnerable children in touch with members of our network. This year the projects, churches and organisations that make up Viva’s Paraguay network are making a concerted effort to reach all the children in the neighbourhoods where we work. We can offer so much help, with many projects specialising in different things like caring for street children, specialised daycare for children of single parents making job opportunities possible, offering quality education for children who would otherwise not have the chance, providing care for kids and adults with HIV/AIDS, and offering meals and places to sleep for children who flee abusive homes. But how can we help them if they don’t know who we are?

Vacation Camp was the perfect way to get to know the kids, to build their trust and show them that when they have problems they can turn to us instead of to drugs or the streets. Now more than 275 children under 12 and 40 teenagers have had a great time with us for a week; what better way is there to build relationships? It was also an opportunity for the projects and churches to work on their co-operation skills. The stronger a network is, the more good it can do for the children in its community. With better knowledge of what the other members do, each project or church can easily help a child find services to meet his or her needs.

Excitingly, we had kids from as far away as Canada get involved in Vacation Camps. 12-year-old Natalie visited Paraguay with her family two years ago and decided to spring to action to help the disadvantaged children she met here – “It really got me excited that I could help out and make this world poverty free!” Teaming up with a friend she wrote poems that inspired her classmates to join the cause, and together they made and sold jewellery, cards and bags in their school. By the end of the year, after much hard work and entrepreneurship, they’d raised $400 to send to Vacation Camps! “It’s all worth it to know that people have smiles on their faces because of us,” exclaims Natalie. And smiles there certainly were – and will be for a long time, thanks to the relationships her generous donation has helped us form with Asuncion’s most vulnerable children.

One volunteer, a 14 year old boy from the children’s home, was the first to sign up as a volunteer for last year’s Viva Christmas Party. This year once again he was first in line to volunteer at Vacation Camp. He received every word of the volunteer training our Protection Programme staff offered. He arrived every day with fresh energy and excitement, a tremendous help and encouragement to the Sports Trainers, thanking staff with a big hug and saying, "I have grown so much inside, I will never forget this, we will continue with this!" And this is a boy who comes from a situation of abuse and neglect himself. This story is similar to many more, both from teenaged kids from the care home, the HIV centre, the local churches. They bonded and had so much fun together, in doing activities with the younger kids! Many were touched by the difficult lives these children live, and yet how they could play and laugh so freely during this week.

Sometimes adults despair that the next generation is going awry, spending all its time online and its money on celebrity magazines. But what we’ve seen is dozens of amazing teenagers excited to get involved in improving their community, forgetting their own problems for a while; and a school-full of teenagers half the world away excited about giving nearly 300 kids a good time and new hope for the future.

~ Anja, Network Director for Viva in Paraguay

Do you have good fundraising ideas? Want to get involved? Visit www.viva.org/GetInvolved to learn more.

You voted for it: Raising the Status of India's Girls

2010-07-28T12:41:00.004+01:00

It's official... educating Indian women is the best way to release them from the dangers and discrimination that accompany their low status. At least, that's the popular choice of our readers:

93% voted for educating women,

7% thought creating quotas in the workplace would raise their status,

And none of our clever readers thought banning the dowry would do much at all.

You're right. The dowry - a bride price, paid by the bride's family to the groom or his parents, often extracted through blackmail just before the wedding - has been banned in India for years. But it's still a widespread practice, entrenching the societal belief that girls are just burdens to be born (or killed before birth). Read our blog on the topic for more information. The problem is so bad that more than 5000 women are killed by their husbands or in-laws every year, because the bride's family can no longer afford to pay them off.
But what about creating quotas in the workplace or in schools? While this might be a valuable step, it's not as fundamental as educating girls from the start ... because who will fill the quotas if girls aren't educated? In fact, many Indian women are very highly educated and successful. India has even had a female prime minister and many prominent female politicians. As it stands, these women are often from well-to-do families who were able to afford to educate all their children, and the girls who truly need extra support are left without it.

The girls who need the most help (and get the least) are, as always, those from poor families who often have to choose which of their children to send to school, which ones to feed, and even which ones to keep alive at birth. Sadly, sons are almost always chosen simply because they're seen as the better investment. Read more from Viva India's topical network director, to hear about her experiences growing up through this discrimination and pushing for her own education.

Educating Indian girls not only gives them greater job opportunities, it also potentially increases the health of their future families, generates more wealth, and gives them the courage and confidence to stand up for themselves against discrimination. Let's see more of this, in addition to tougher action against dowry-related crimes and more opportunities created for women in the workplace.

Visit www.viva.org/girlchild to find out how we're helping change India's ideas about girls.

Graduating Good Workers

2010-07-26T15:51:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago I travelled to Nepal to attend a big event in that country: 18 project staff were graduating from our Viva Equip People programme. 18 might not sound like very many – until you remember that Christians account for less than 3% of Nepal’s population, and that each one of these graduates will have a ripple effect on their church, project and community.

Viva Equip People is a big deal, especially here in Nepal where many children are at risk, and often little value is given to them. The people we’re equipping are working with children at risk in local projects or churches, and are amazingly compassionate and hard-working. But their work with children can be limited because they have very few opportunities to develop themselves and improve their work.

The course involves bringing together a group of project workers for training in the essential attitudes and skills of working with children: things like understanding children’s rights and needs, and skills in listening to children. They also learn how to best develop their work with children who suffer from such things as a lack of education, or being in forced labour.

Often these workers have great intentions and passionate hearts, but no background knowledge about protecting and helping children. And Nepalese children certainly need help and protection. On a daily basis there are many – often despite the best efforts of parents, friends and family – who face being trafficked into India as sex workers, forced labourers and domestic workers in unfriendly homes where they’re especially vulnerable to abuse. In their own homes and villages they may be threatened by physical and sexual abuse, which in turn leads to homelessness as they take to the streets to flee the violence. Many of them have parents but never see them because they’ve left to find work; others lost their parents in the recent Maoist insurgency. And Nepalese girls face discrimination and hardship every day because of their gender.

Thanks in part to the development of our partner CarNetNepal, and the programme Viva Equip People, Christian child care workers in Nepal are learning how to help the children around them and urgently trying to reach more. Through the Nepal network a Parentless Children Working Group has been formed – these people advocate with local churches to get to work caring for children.

One inspirational leader is Sharmila Ghimire. Sharmila is married to CarNetNepal co-ordinator Dhan Raj. She runs a programme for street boys. Her approach to rescuing and rehabilitating the boys was “all heart”, she said to me – she had great intentions, but didn’t quite know how to connect with the boys. After she completed a VEP course, Sharmila could communicate better with children and is much better able to offer them personal counselling. This has meant more success getting the boys reintegrated with their own families, since she can help them talk through their problems and address deep family issues.

A recent VEP graduate from the town of Butwal, Pastor Sunil, had his view of children changed completely by the course. Before the course he focused his energy entirely on the adults of his congregation and didn’t think children were useful members of the church. He only attended Viva Equip People because he thought it might help him learn something new about working with children in the congregation. But his whole mindset was so changed by what he learned – that children are integral members of the church and have valuable opinions – that he not only made the children’s ministry in his church more effective, but started a new ministry to reach out to the vulnerable children in his community!

The Viva Equip People course takes a year, so graduation is a big event. I travelled with network leaders and trainers from Kathmandu on an eight hour bus-ride (in business suits!), and then we slept in a local church before joining the graduation ceremony. Our graduates proudly wore their gowns and showed off their certificates, and even composed a song about caring for children and protecting children’s rights. Another exciting thing was that there were nine men and nine women graduating … in Nepal, professional groups are usually skewed towards only including men.

While I was in Nepal I had the chance to meet many of the frontline workers from the network there. One of them was Pastor Surya, one of the Viva Equip People graduates. Surya received support to start a programme in his community to protect children at risk. VEP helped him realise that children have special requirements and need extra protection, and he was bold enough to take his church in a completely new direction by acting on it.

Viva Equip People is having such great results that the Nepal network has a vision for it: they want every Christian child care worker in the country to go through VEP training! This little Christian community in the mainly Hindu country is having an impact beyond its numbers. Through courses like Viva Equip People they’ve learned that the church – them! – can succeed in its responsibility to demonstrate what family should look like to the people of Nepal. That means welcoming everyone, standing up for the rights of women and children, and taking care of the poor and oppressed. These 18 VEP graduates are going out into Nepalese communities to achieve that goal.

I spent the other part of my trip checking up on the progress of the Daughter project in southern Nepal. Keep an eye out for another post from me on some of the things that are happening through Daughter.

~ Ian, Viva Asia Co-Ordinator

Learn more about Viva Equip People at http://www.viva.org/QualityCare/

Warming Up in Paraguay

2010-07-22T12:27:00.000+01:00

All this week dozens of vulnerable children in Paraguay are having the time of their life, while at the same time building life-saving relationships with projects and churches that want to help them … thanks to the power of working together! We’re calling it “Colonia de Vacaciones”, or Vacation Camp.

It all started last Christmas when Red Viva Paraguay (‘Red’ means ‘network’ in Spanish) threw Viva Christmas Parties for almost 1,500 children in several central neighbourhoods of Asuncion, Paraguay’s capital city. These Christmas Parties are a great way to introduce kids to projects that want to help them, and for projects in our Paraguay network to get used to working together. Throwing Christmas Parties for hundreds of vulnerable kids takes a lot of teamwork!

The parties were such a success that the participating projects decided to keep holding community outreach activities throughout the year, so that we can get to know the children of our neighbourhoods and build up strong relationships with them. That way when they have problems at home or need other kinds of help, they’ll trust us to help them instead of turning to the streets or to drugs.

Viva’s World Weekend of Prayer back in June really helped us kick things off, as more projects and churches wanted to see continued outreach. So we formed a working group to come up with strategies to reach vulnerable children. The first proposal was for Vacation Camp, and we went for it. With the help of a PE teacher who offered to come from Germany and do the sports training, and a group of young girls in Canada who helped us raise funds for the project, we were all ready to go!

There are five local projects (members of Red Viva Paraguay) and seven actively supporting local churches working together to bring Vacation Camp to the kids of Asuncion. We started by meeting every week to co-ordinate the event and, despite little bumps along the way, the burden of work - and fundraising - was shared among everyone. If you’ve ever tried working with a group of people you’ll know that’s hard to do! Viva also provided training for all the volunteers who would run Vacation Camp. Especially important is teaching these volunteers how to identify signs of abuse that children might show, so that we can get help for them immediately.

One of the most exciting things for me has been seeing teenagers from two of the projects, a care home for children and youth and a day centre for kids affected by HIV/AIDS, involved in Vacation Camp. If you know teenagers, you know they often want to do their own thing. But we have more than 30 amazing teenagers helping as volunteers with the younger kids! They have a leading role in organising the events, and also they’re on the front line, interacting with the kids. Even more importantly, these teenagers attended Viva’s training and learned to look out for abuse … a skill they’ll be able to use whenever they meet new friends in their neighbourhoods.

Unfortunately we had a bout of cold weather this week – it’s winter here in beautiful South America – so not as many kids came out on Monday as we were hoping for. Vacation Camp was originally supposed to be held in a park in central Asuncion, but we were able to move quickly into a sports hall on the property of a children’s home – a member of Red Viva Paraguay, of course! Working together as a network has made all the difference in bringing an exciting camp to these vulnerable kids.

On Monday and Tuesday our volunteers braved the cold to pull off a variety of activities designed to help kids warm up. Children from age six right through to teenagers had sports training, played football, learned dance choreography and expressed their creativity with arts and crafts, ate a delicious hot snack, and learned about the love of Jesus through a dramatic show from a team of evangelistic performers – including clowns! (No party in South America is complete in without clowns.)

For the rest of the week, our teenaged volunteers are going to walk through the neighbourhoods around Vacation Camp looking for more street kids to invite. We don’t want any child to miss the chance to meet people who love them and hear the gospel! We’re hoping to forge close relationships with more children from this community, and their families, to bring them closer to churches in their area and get them as much help as we can offer. Which is a lot, since there is such a variety of organisations in Viva’s Paraguay network … day care centres, community schools, day centres and community kitchens, care homes, and churches all work together to improve the lives of Asuncion’s vulnerable children.

The response from the staff and volunteers of all the projects and churches making Vacation Camp possible is very positive. They can’t wait to do more community outreach camps like this soon, when the weather warms up and more kids will come out! Here at the network we’re just so excited to see local projects and churches really working together to reach out to more children at risk. Watch this space to see what we come up with next!

~ Anja, Network Director for Viva in Paraguay

Find out more about what we’re doing to reach out to children in Latin America in the areas of …

Advocacy: http://www.viva.org/Advocates/
Health: http://www.viva.org/Feeding/
Safety: http://www.viva.org/Encounter/

Why is it so important to train the staff and volunteers working with children? http://www.viva.org/QualityCare/

The Best Way to Prevent Child Abuse

2010-07-19T16:46:00.000+01:00

Last week we had a little poll: What's the best way to prevent child abuse? And we sneakily only let you vote for one answer.

77% of respondents thought the best way is to teach adults about children's rights.

22% thought that it's best to empower children to advocate for themselves.

And nobody voted for creating laws that ban child abuse!

Of course, all the answers were somewhat right, but you need all three to be really effective. Laws and policies that ban child abuse are helpful. But child abuse will always continue if it's culturally acceptable, as it is in countries like Bolivia where 40% of teachers admit to thinking physical punishment is an acceptable way to discipline a student. We've used this figure before -- 80,000 Latin American children die every year in their own homes because of domestic abuse.

The adults of today's world need to be educated against neglect and every kind of abuse: physical, sexual and psychological. The problem exists now, and the perpetrators need to be corrected now! Many parents grew up in an abusive environment and think abuse is part of a normal childhood. They need to learn otherwise.

But not every adult listens. In fact, sometimes being told what not to do in their own home can cause people to inwardly revolt. Pressure has to come from below as well as above: from children themselves.

Big things happen when children know their rights and work together to speak out against child abuse! That's why we're committed to all three ways of preventing child abuse: we train project leaders and workers to protect the children in their care and to counsel parents against abuse. We give children the power and knowledge to speak out against abuse.

When thousands of children and hundreds of project workers start acting differently, governments (and parents!) notice. Keep an eye out for great success in Uganda, where this is exactly what's happening!

Growing Girls in India

2010-07-15T10:39:00.001+01:00

Growing up in India can be hard, especially if you’re part of a large family. But in my experience, it’s nearly impossible for girls growing up in India to become the women they want to be. I was born and raised in Andhra Pradesh, a state on the south eastern coast of India. My family was Catholic – in a state where 90% of the people are Hindu and 8% are Muslim! But the culture of mistreating girls pervades everywhere in India, even into Catholic homes.

I know that if I hadn’t fought hard for my education, I would have ended up married off right after secondary school, living in a village in Andhra Pradesh with a husband I didn’t love. This is real life for the vast majority of Indian women. In fact, in India today nearly half of the women who are now between 20 and 24 years old were married before they turned 18. That’s our modern generation!

For an Indian girl, being denied an education means teenaged marriage, no knowledge of human rights, no knowledge of birth control (and therefore many births, dangerous in rural areas), high infant mortality rates, and a low family income ... which just makes it harder to support her many children. It also leads to generations of the same thing, in both her sons and her daughters. Children whose mothers have been educated are twice as likely to go to school as children of unschooled mothers.

Because of this widespread lack of general education, knowledge about AIDS is twice as high in South Asian young men as it is in young women. That probably explains why AIDS affects three times more young women than young men in the region.

Why aren’t girls being educated? Indian culture dictates that boys are just more important than girls. When boys are born there’s a celebration, but when girls are born the ritual is the same as for a funeral. Thousands of girls never even make it into the world – even as you read this, many unborn and newborn girls are being killed. And those that are allowed to live are kept at home to do chores and take care of their little siblings, while their brothers go to school. The expectation is that a girl will just get married and leave the family anyway, so why bother investing in her education? To benefit her in-laws?

In the Himalayan region the situation is especially bad. Husbands and fathers leave their hometown to look for work in the big cities like Delhi. They leave their wives – usually uneducated, of course – and their children at home. But in the cities, the men can easily get hooked on an expensive lifestyle of eating out and visiting sex workers. Often there’s no money left to send home!

So their wives take menial jobs in and around their villages, helping with farming to support the family. You can imagine that menial jobs in India don’t pay that much. Some of their children – which they’re likely to have a lot of, not having knowledge of birth control – have to sacrifice their education to keep the house in order and save money. Do you think the ones staying home are sons, or daughters?

I was a stubborn girl, and when my parents pressed me to marry after I graduated secondary school, I insisted going to university instead. Actually, I even threatened to kill myself if they married me off! My poor parents had to give in, and I was able to get a university education. After I graduated they again strongly pushed me to get married and start a family. But again I pushed back. This time I entered my Master’s degree. My parents realised I was serious. Later I went on to pursue my doctoral studies.

Thanks to my stubbornness, and mostly thanks to God who helped me and gave me boldness, today I’m able to work for Viva in India. My demand for education led me to the place where I am now, in a position to influence the future of thousands of young girls across the subcontinent. I was unique – I suspect most girls, especially ones without a Christian upbringing, don’t have the guts to butt heads with their parents over heavy matters like marriage!

And that’s the tragic thing. 52% of Indian women are illiterate, despite the government’s great attempts and successes at boosting the overall literacy rate. The problem facing India’s girls isn’t necessarily a lack of schools or expertise, it’s a lack of respect. That’s why I do my job – heading up Viva’s Jyoti Forum (Jyoti means ‘light’ in Hindi), so that more girls will be able to stand up for themselves and get an education. My day at work involves talking to project leaders around India about respecting and protecting girls. We organise training courses and bring together community leaders, NGO heads, pastors and project workers for various conferences on girl child issues to learn how and why to protect girls and invest in their futures.

If the goal is Eradicating Poverty, it can’t be done without empowering women … because if half the population is still in the dark ages, poverty will always exist. If the goal is Empowering Women, it’s impossible without educating them … because an uneducated woman will simply never be able to keep up in a man’s world like India. Educating women brings up their social status, gives them job opportunities, releases them from forced dependence on men, gives them the knowledge they need to take care of their children, and ensures the next generation is educated too.

The difficulties facing Indian girls come from many different areas of society, and so it will take many different people to help fight them all. The only way we will have the power to change India’s cultural biases against girls is by bringing together local community leaders, pastors, projects, schools, non-governmental organisations and parents, showing them why they should value girls, and creating practical ways to protect the female half of the next generation. A crisis is facing India as long as girls are undervalued and disrespected. Yet I have hope, I see jyoti -- light -- on the horizon. When we work together we have real power to make a huge difference, and that’s why I’m proud to be working with Viva.

~ K. in Delhi

Learn more about Jyoti Forum at www.viva.org/girlchild/

Why do we do it? Check out www.viva.org/MissionStatement/

NEWSFLASH: Kids Win 2010 World Cup

2010-07-12T16:51:00.001+01:00

I can’t believe the World Cup’s finally finished ... and what a roller coaster it’s been. Normally I live and work in Kampala, Uganda where I’m the Communications and Fundraising coordinator with Viva’s Africa office. But in June I travelled to South Africa to be involved in a day camp programme called Keep Them Safe, which Viva’s network in South Africa is helping roll out to make sure local kids stay safe during the heightened risk of trafficking and abuse that’s followed the FIFA World Cup here. Keep Them Safe was held in 13 communities around Cape Town, and reached more than 1000 kids each day!

South Africa wasn’t entirely as I had expected it to be. Wearing two pairs of socks, having porridge for breakfast each morning and seeing snow capped mountains in the distance -- the weather in the Western Cape was not quite the World Cup ‘summer’ I had in mind when planning my trip here! However, I simply cannot complain about the cold, especially when some of the children we were working with turned up barefoot.

On the first day of the Keep Them Safe camps, I visited the Western Cape town of Kolenhoef. Spirits were high among the 80 or so kids who arrived for the camp, walking from their homes in the surrounding farmland. In this community, some of the extremely poor families live in makeshift shacks on the land of the farmer they work for. The volunteers were excited too …if a bit nervous about running a fulltime programme for four weeks. 260 local volunteers have come together to help make Keep Them Safe possible.

The children were then given a taste of the different activities they could take part in. Each camp ran four programmes: sport, arts and crafts, performing arts, and entrepreneurship. At the end of that first day we ended with a lunch of bread and coffee. Yes, coffee for all! “This is all we have to give them,” explained one of the volunteers. But just as we were finishing serving all the kids, the local council truck pulled up with six buckets of soup. The volunteer’s faces lit up with surprise, and all the children were warmed up nicely by the second course of lunch.

Each different camp ‘owned’ its programme, rolling out the essentials of the Keep Them Safe manual with their own unique flare. At the same time there were elements of each activity that highlighted the networking involved in Keep Them Safe and that they were part of a whole community of 13 camps. So what did we actually get up to?

The Entrepreneurship teams were the first to demonstrate the power of working together. What better way to do this than by making a community go kart and racing against each other?! Kolenhof’s young builders were sent on a treasure hunt that led them to a local company who paid for basic construction materials. Back at base camp, they found additional materials that improved their high-speed vehicles. Our Entrepreneurs learned valuable lessons in presenting themselves in a corporate situation and looking for opportunities around them to build upon.

Kolenhof's Arts and Crafts team was somewhat calmer than its Entrepreneurship team throughout the four weeks. After making bracelets, they designed cheerleader outfits for the Go Kart Race with recycled material, and finally had fun making a giant community vuvuzela. They also painted a banner in the shape of a puzzle piece that fits with other pieces from the other camps, to be unveiled all together as a giant artistic testament to networking at the town hall.

Then last Saturday the race was on. The serenity of the beautiful Jonkershoek nature reserve was shattered by the cheers and shouts of 1200 youth ‘engineers’, cheerleaders and supporters from our 13 camps. Points were awarded for teams with the most times around the track (by pushing, sliding when the wheels broke or carrying the smallest child to be found on whatever piece survived when a kart fell apart!), spirit of the community as a whole, and finally, not giving up. These prizes were awarded by the local council at the closing ceremony. And the soup kept coming … the generosity of the local council became overwhelming when each day more than enough was delivered.

The Performing Arts teams all took part in a talent competition. Each team performed a 30-minute act on the topic of human trafficking, domestic violence, substance abuse, or child abuse. A highlight for me was a play that included young children wearing ‘For Sale’ signs, advocating against the local practice of selling children into labour. Grown-up community members were so grateful for the chance for their children to be on stage. For the performers, seeing their photographs on the big screen as their act was introduced, having their art work displayed and being listened to and judged showed that they were valued and important.

What about the Sports team? Keep Them Safe is about more than just … well, keeping them safe. Our goal was to build a lasting support network that would keep kids coming back. Making sure South African children are safe for the long term is vital, and the coordination team is looking at ways to continue to keep building up the local volunteers and keep encouraging the communities to reach out and help one another for a brighter future in South Africa. This process will be kicked off by a sports day in September to allow community teams that have been formed to compete against one another. They’re calling it ‘Keep Them Active’ – building up a generation of youth who know the power of working together and advocating for themselves.

If you were near Stellenbosch Municipality Town Hall on Friday night, you would have seen a spectacular closing ceremony. This one was, in a way, more important than the one that went on Sunday night, when a few unimportant men in red t-shirts manhandled a golden trophy. At our ceremony, more than 1000 children were the winners and they celebrated by unveiling hand-made banners, receiving prizes, thanking their partners, performing plays, singing, dancing, partying and possibly angling for another cup of soup.

~ E. in Stellenbosch

Keeping kids safe is at the core of what Viva does. Find out more at www.viva.org/qualitycare

Veggie Magic ... or Hydroponics?

2010-07-08T17:18:00.001+01:00

Whether or not you believe in climate change, you can’t deny that the environment around some of the world’s poorest cities is being significantly hurt by human activity. This is the case in San Jose, capital city of Costa Rica, where high-yield agriculture in the countryside is resulting in dirty rivers, and rapid city growth is causing deforestation and soil erosion. For a child living in the slums of San Jose, this translates to an unstable home and little access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

Fact: The World Bank estimates that by 2013, two-thirds of Latin America’s poor will be living in cities. That's a lot of crowds.

Another fact: 20 of Latin America’s largest cities are built on steep hills that are prone to landslides and flooding during the rainy season. One of these is San Jose.

People who can’t afford good housing live on these dangerous slopes. This means that the 42% of children in San Jose’s slums who are already struggling to avoid child labour, gangs and life on the streets also have to contend with scarce land and poor soil quality. What does poor soil quality have to do with children at risk? Well, poor soil grows poor vegetables … and we all know how important vegetables are for helping kids to grow up big and strong. Sadly this problem will only get worse as more and more poor rural families move into the big city to look for work.

Viva’s city-wide network of projects in San Jose has developed a feeding centre initiative. (See Viva’s previous blog on feeding centres.) Feeding centres are located in inner-city churches and staffed by local volunteers. Children can come here for a healthy breakfast and lunch, and they can also leave their little siblings for free child care while they attend to important business of their own, like school!

In fact, in this way feeding centres have made it possible for many inner-city kids to attend school who couldn’t before because they had to care for younger siblings. And because many children who do attend school don’t get proper meals, feeding centres have been a good way to boost grades. You’ll understand if you’ve ever gone to class hungry and tried to concentrate: to be a good student you need good food.

The feeding centres aren’t just offering great meals and babysitting, though. Five of them have started their own hydroponic vegetable gardens! Hydroponics is the perfect answer to the lack of gardening space in San Jose’s slums, because it doesn’t require soil to grow great vegetables and can be done in a tight spot.

What is hydroponics? It’s a way of growing vegetables (or any plant) without soil. Instead, you dangle the roots into water and add a fertiliser solution that gives the plant everything it needs to produce big juicy vegetables. Hydroponic-lovers claim that hydroponically-grown vegetables actually bear better vegetables, because the plant can focus on its produce rather than on sucking nutrients through dense soil – which apparently is hard work for a plant.

On top of that, hydroponic plants can be stacked while they grow, thanks to their lack of soil. This saves lots of space, which is always great in a tight urban environment.

Not only are these hydroponic vegetable gardens putting healthy, nutritious veggies on kids’ plates twice a day, they’re also helping the feeding centres along the road to self-sufficiency. Obviously getting your ingredients for free is better than paying for them, no matter what a good discount compassionate local businesses offer. And offer they have: large local grocers give feeding centres a great deal on staple foods. It’s wonderful to see the whole community get involved in helping feed kids and send them to school. At Viva, our whole mission revolves around getting churches, schools, projects and individual members of the community to work together to help children at risk. Feeding centres are a perfect example of a network at its best.

Who loves the feeding centres’ strange vegetable gardens the most? The kids! It’s a great way to help them understand nutrition, learn how to grow a vegetable garden, and have a real-life science experiment all at once, by getting the kids involved in growing and taking care of the vegetables destined for their plates.

Hundreds of kids now know how to grow their own vegetables without depleting the scarce soil of San Jose’s slippery slopes. Our hope is that they’ll take this knowledge – along with the education feeding centres make possible by providing day care and healthy food – and use it to improve San Jose’s long-term sustainability.

Learn more about feeding centres at www.viva.org/Feeding

What does God think about Child Abuse?

2010-07-06T12:32:00.002+01:00

The fact can’t be denied that millions of children everywhere in the world are physically, emotionally and sexually abused. Child abuse has been called a ‘national emergency’ in the United States, and in India 223 million children (73 million of whom are boys) have had some kind of sexual activity forced on them.

Abuse isn’t just physically harmful to a child – although every year 80,000 Latin American children die of abuse-related injuries in their own homes. Adults who have survived child abuse are often haunted by fear, mistrust and poor relationships with their own spouses and children. It’s a crime that affects multiple generations.

But God has something to say to abused children:

“I offered my back to those who beat me …
I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting.
Because the Sovereign LORD helps me, I will not be disgraced.
Therefore have I set my face like flint,
and I know I will not be put to shame.
He who vindicates me is near.” (Isaiah 50:6,7)

What God wants abused children to know is this: You have value. You should not be ashamed. Hold on to me, and I will protect you in a way that surpasses the physical. I love you and want you to be safe and happy.

But, amazingly, in the same book we also find some words for those who perpetrate abuse:

“’Lift up your eyes and look around;
all your sons gather and come to you.
As surely as I live,’ declares the LORD;
‘you will wear them all as ornaments;
you will put them on, like a bride.’” (Isaiah 49:18)

In many cases people abuse children because of violence in their own past. Their own eyes are cast down with shame because of the disrespect and violence they experienced during their own childhood. Often they’re ashamed and frustrated because of unemployment or substance abuse. In many tragic cases, parents take out their anger on a child they never wanted, the product of rape or a forced marriage.

But what God wants is for parents to take pride in their children! Think of a bride, showing off her engagement ring to all her admiring friends. That’s exactly how God says parents should feel about their children. They are the crown of a marriage and the joy of their parents and are to be prized like precious jewels!

God is exhorting abusive parents to be released from whatever shame is causing them to abuse their children; to change their ways and be immensely proud of what he’s blessed them with.

That’s why Viva is working with parents, project workers and community leaders in places like Cambodia, Nepal, Uganda, and all over Latin America. Where children aren’t valued by society, it’s hard for individual parents to learn otherwise. So our city-wide networks are showing parents how to prevent and report abuse, and are also offering practical support to help improve the difficult family circumstances that can often lead to abuse.

Project leaders and workers are another important key to stopping child abuse. Sometimes these dedicated workers devote themselves to simply feeding or clothing the children in their care, and forget to value them as humans. Viva’s working hard to make sure project workers have the best training in child protection and abuse prevention, so that the most vulnerable children not only have a safe place to live but also a trustworthy adult to love and support them as they grow.

We’re also working through 8 of our city-wide networks across Peru, Bolivia, Costa Rica and Uganda to run child advocacy programmes that are helping children free themselves and their peers from the cycles of abuse and disrespect.

Christians have a responsibility, as the family of God, to watch out for abuse in their churches and social circles. It’s our job to lovingly rebuke and correct abusive parents, and to help them overcome whatever haunts them from their past. It’s also up to us to restore abused children and help them realise their intrinsic worth.

God wants all children to live free from abuse, and all parents to be proud of and value their children. Only when we work together can we see this become a reality. Will you join us?

~ J. in Oxford

To learn more about issues of child abuse, please visit www.viva.org/Abuse.

Get involved with Viva at www.viva.org!

Attention World!

2010-07-02T11:50:00.001+01:00

Over our World Weekend of Prayer, more than 2000 vulnerable kids from Viva’s network of projects around Cochabamba, Bolivia flooded the streets of their city.

First they met for a prayer meeting in the stadium, then they unleashed their advocating power by marching through the city with banners and balloons. Everyone noticed! Local authorities, businesses, and government bodies ‘woke up’ and started asking questions about the kids living on their own streets.

A few thousand kids who have caught the spirit of advocacy are literally changing their entire country.

This is exactly what our world needs – we have to start paying more attention to vulnerable children. For one thing, 56% of all children are living in severe deprivation. Not only are these children suffering in the present, but they’ll be woefully unprepared for the future. By advocating for children and teaching them to advocate for themselves, Christians have a chance to end poverty, abuse and ignorance.

There’s not a moment to lose. We need to be involved in these children’s lives now, showing them God’s heart by being God’s hands and feet. One of the best ways to do that is by spending time and resources on them, showing them how much they’re valued, and giving them the power and responsibility to change their communities. For many kids, it might be the first time anyone has ever demonstrated the words “I love you”.

So what’s Viva doing? We’re directly involved in helping teach children to advocate for themselves, so that they can represent the issues facing them to their parents, teachers and local leaders. (Take a look at our blogs on Child Advocates in Uganda and Bolivia.) And we’re training the people who work with children in projects, usually locals with big hearts, to listen to children and keep them safe. As these adults learn the importance of children, they teach their friends, co-workers and fellow churchgoers. This way thousands of influential leaders all over the developing world are learning that children need to be valued and listened to.

God himself has spoken up about child advocacy. He says:

“Listen to me, you islands; hear this, you distant nations: Before I was born the LORD called me; from my birth he has made mention of my name. He made my mouth like a sharpened sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me into a polished arrow and concealed me in his quiver.” (Isaiah 49:1-2)

This should be the war cry of every child who has experienced repression or discrimination because of his or her young age.

God made each child; we know that. We also know that he loves all children, including us! But many children are denied the right to speak out on their own behalf, or on God’s. This is disturbingly prevalent in our own culture as well as in developing countries, where children are often seen as economic tools for overcoming need – or just extra mouths to feed.

But God wants children to be advocates, and he requires adults to give them the respect that a ‘sharpened sword’ or ‘polished arrow’ deserves. We’re seeing cultures change as children speak out for their own rights and safety! Christians are called to protect children, and that also means teaching them to look out for themselves. By teaching vulnerable children to advocate before their elders and authorities on issues concerning them, we can help them become powerful bringers of lasting cultural change.

“I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people, to restore the land and to reassign its desolate inheritances; to say to the captives, ‘Come out,’ and to those in darkness, ‘Be free!’” (Isaiah 49:8-9)

God has used children to do incredible things. Today, he’s sharpening his swords to cut through the cultural legacies binding children to misery and poverty: things like abuse, lack of education, and forced labour. God is promising to turn today’s vulnerable children into tomorrow’s warriors, and as the work in Bolivia and Uganda shows it’s already started.

To shape the adults of the future, we need to reach the children of today. If we want men and women who stand up for justice, we need to bring up children who know what justice is. And so many children have nobody to bring them up. This is a job for Christians, but we need the help of anyone willing. So join us!

~ J. in Oxford

Learn more about child advocacy at http://www.viva.org/Advocacy/

Read a Viva Volunteer's account of child advocacy at work in Bolivia.

Daughters in Danger

2010-06-28T09:00:00.005+01:00

Nepal has captured the world’s imagination for centuries. Until recently it was known to the world as a Himalayan Hindu Kingdom, though in 2008 it became a Democratic Republic after 10 years of Maoist insurgency. It’s also the home of Mt. Everest and eight of the world’s ten highest mountains. It’s caught between India and China and currently hosts more than 100,000 refugees from Bhutan.

Thanks to their long and interconnected history, Nepalis can travel to India with no visa and work there without any restrictions. While this is great for adults seeking their fortune in their giant southern neighbour’s cities, it means all sorts of trouble for Nepali children. It’s estimated that up to 7,000 women and children are trafficked across Nepal’s porous borders into India every year, where they’re forced into prostitution – 20% of these are under 16. Nepali females are easy prey: while 69% of males in Nepal are literate, only 42% of females are. As a result of this lack of education and inability to stand up for themselves, 200,000 children of Nepali prostitutes are thought to be living in Indian brothels.

Together with our city-wide network in Katmandu, Viva has been implementing a programme called ‘Daughter’ to teach girls how to stay safe from traffickers, and to show their families and communities how to spot and report trafficking activity. How are we getting word out? Through the church, of course! Before Daughter started in 2008, less than five churches in Nepal were involved in helping children who had been trafficked or abused or preventing these crimes. But by the end of Daughter’s second year, 70 local churches in nine border districts were responding to the needs of these children! That’s pretty good, considering only 0.5% of Nepal’s 30 million people are Christians.

In Nepal, girls who have been raped or sexually abused are encouraged to keep quiet, since it’s thought that bringing these issues to light would disgrace the whole society. A resident of Mahottari describes it like this: “People still are living in silence. They do not know where to go and whom to complain. Many accept it as part of our culture to live in agony for the sake of the dignity of the family, or are scared that they would be forsaken.”

But now that more than 90 pastors have been trained to teach about and deal with child sexual abuse and child trafficking, thousands of girls have a community leader who they can turn to, who will advocate for them before the police (notorious for turning a blind eye) and their families. By 2009, 3764 children and nearly 2000 adults had been taught how to avoid and report trafficking and sexual abuse through the animated Daughter tool.

The Daughter tool is a film about a girl suffering from incest. It’s also distributed as an illustrated flip chart, since most of the country is subject to power cuts for 18 hours out of every day. Viva’s also been involved in distributing 20,000 abuse hotline cards to young people through the network. In fact the whole scheme has been so successful that the local governments have recognised the unity of Christians in their communities. It’s such an unusual thing for local religious groups to campaign against sexual abuse and exploitation that we’re getting a fair bit of attention!

Despite all the success, it’s still an uphill climb. Frequent Maoist strikes have made it impossible to travel or cross borders, so many events have had to be cancelled or postponed. And weak infrastructure has made travel a real challenge; church leaders want to get to border districts to train locals in protecting children, but there are often no roads or the bridges have been washed away in landslides.

On the other hand, local churches in one of the most inaccessible regions have formed volunteer cell groups to intervene in cases of trafficking and sexual abuse. And 19 churches in the Rupendehi network have started a programme to feed and clothe street children – something the churches in that district have never done before! They’re in the process of getting these children involved in their churches.

Working towards a common goal has had the added benefit of unifying the local congregations. According to one Nepali pastor, churches are sometimes so divided that pastors will purposely change their route in order not to see one another in the streets! Now they’re forming networks and thinking up new ways to help children at risk. They’re even starting Sunday schools, which were nearly unknown before.

While trafficking and sexual exploitation are a dismal fact of life in Nepal, the local churches have a fantastic opportunity to reach out with the love of Christ and demonstrate God’s liberating power to the young people in their communities through Daughter.

Here’s a heartbreaking, yet encouraging, success before we sign off. Laxmi was 16 when her cousin raped her while walking her home from work early in 2009. But at a Daughter forum a few months later she said, "I am breaking the silence this afternoon. In my society I am not supposed to speak about sexual abuse because I am a daughter. I reported this case to the police but they did not forward my case. Even my parents did not hear me but they suggested me to suppress this issue for the sake of their social dignity. But, today I realise this is not only cruelty with me - I am thinking of thousands of other daughters who could be victims at any time. The Daughter film has taught me to intervene in cases of child sexual abuse.”

Through Laxmi’s testimony and the effectiveness of the Daughter presentation, the people in her town saw that their culture required a radical change. At the forum that afternoon they committed to prevent child sexual abuse and to help Laxmi fight for the rights of Nepali daughters.

~ Viva, Nepal

Would you like to learn more about the issue of child abuse? Visit www.viva.org/Abuse.aspx.

Keep in touch with Viva by joining our Facebook fan page.

MDG's Part 4: Gender Equality

2010-06-24T09:00:00.009+01:00

If I’m totally honest, I’ve often thought of gender equality with a yawn and a roll of my eyes. (I’m a woman, so that’s kind of allowed!) It reminds me of militant bra-waving feminism, and in my own experience I’ve never been discriminated against for my gender, so it’s just never been an issue. But as I’ve looked into it further, I’ve discovered that ‘Promoting Gender Equality and Empowering Women’ is actually a one of the most important Millennium Development Goals to strive for.

In western nations women are pretty much free from oppression. But if you take a look at countries such as India and Nepal, or throughout the Middle East, you see that there is still much work to be done. In India for example the culture of paying a dowry still exists (a ‘bride-price’ paid to the groom by the girl’s family, either money or goods) and it is taking the lives of thousands of women each year – millions if you count unborn girls.

Imagine a poor Indian couple expecting a child. If it’s a boy, he will be the glory of his family: sent to school and given the best opportunities possible, so that one day he can take care of his parents and bring them grandchildren. But if a girl is born, the parents will spend time and money raising a child who will ultimately not only marry out of the family, but who will become a money-sink if her future husband demands a dowry.

What do these expectant parents do? They go to an ultrasound clinic to discover the gender of the child. Having an ultrasound for this purpose is illegal in India but millions of pregnant women do it anyway. If what they see is the form of a little girl, the odds are quite high that she’ll be aborted and her parents will keep trying for a boy. Of course not every Indian couple does this. But many do – 500,000 little girls are aborted every year.

Now imagine a young woman about to get married. At the last moment her fiancé and his parents demand a dowry; this might even happen on the wedding day! To avoid the shame of having her marriage fall through, her parents go into debt to pay the dowry. The marriage takes place, but a few months later her in-laws want more money. Her husband threatens to harm her if her parents refuse to pay, but they simply can’t afford it. Calling their bluff, he beats her and then lights her on fire in the kitchen. It’s appalling, but statistics show that these ‘accidental’ kitchen fires take the lives of more than 5,000 Indian women every year. No wonder there’s often mourning when a girl child is born.

So what can be done? It requires more than banning dowries – that’s already been tried, with no success. What’s needed is for the worth of girls to be made clear to India; to parents, governments, officials and the girls themselves. So four of Viva’s city-wide networks in India have come together to start raising the profile of little girls through our ‘Jyoti Forum’ (Jyoti is a girl’s name that means ‘light’ in Hindi.) We’re bringing together Christian organisations and secular ones to work on this. Inter-faith collaboration is a rare thing in India, but it’s the only way to change the opinions and cultural roots of Indian society.

The city of Vijayawada is a great example of where Jyoti is taking off. Viva’s network of projects and churches in Vijayawada is being trained to care for the particular needs of girls in their city: child abuse, forced labour, sexual discrimination, early forced marriages, and child prostitution. Their aim is to bring 250 girls to high school completion by 2012, as well as reaching thousands of girls through these projects and churches. Raising the standing of girls in India is bigger than just preventing discrimination and abuse, it involves changing peoples’ mindsets about the importance of girl children.

Through Jyoti, these organisations, projects and churches come together voluntarily to discuss issues facing girls in their communities, and to learn how to protect young girls’ rights and persons. Working through networks is the perfect way to bring vital training, information and seminars to thousands of workers nationwide, and to unite them in their purpose to help the girl children. It’s also important to start at the top, with the recognition that India’s society is deeply hierarchical. So we begin by training leaders in projects and communities, so that in time the new mindset will trickle down.

At Viva we believe that India can become a friendly place for little girls to grow up. The church needs to model this change for the rest of society. Just picture a church filled with Indian girls who have been freed from oppression and inequality, praising God happily and equally alongside men and boys! As India realises the importance of girl children, more girls will be educated, more girls will be able to contribute to their families, and dowries will become a thing of the past.

~ J. in Oxford

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Working for Christ in India ...

2010-06-21T09:00:00.000+01:00

… is HARD WORK. I have just taken up the post of Regional Director in Viva’s Indian office, and I have been on the road for weeks - first to England, then to a conference in India, then moving my family from Mumbai to Delhi. Finally I’m in my new office, getting to know the intricacies of how Viva works in India. The need is huge, and individually we are so small. But together we can accomplish many things, and I’m very excited to be here, at work for Christ! Let me tell you a little of how I came to be here.

I became a Christian as a teenager living near Mumbai. Shortly after my conversion I was prophesied over, that I would “set the captives free”. I started my career in a mutual funds company, but saw that my real calling led in a very different path: working in social and church issues.

I began working with a Christian organisation in Mumbai, helping to free drug addicts from their addictions. During my time there I witnessed many miracles. Our method of rehabilitating drug addicts was this: pray constantly for ten days. We would never give them any alternate medication, but rather did the only thing we really knew how to do: share the love of Christ and pray. Often by the sixth day the man we were praying for would be free from his addiction, with no withdrawal pain! Now that’s what I call Jesus at work! There is no denying that prayer is a powerful thing.

Later, I worked as Chief of Investigations for another Christian organisation. In this position I would visit brothels incognito and identify girls not legally old enough to be prostitutes. These girls are almost always in situations of what we call ‘forced sexual exploitation and abuse’, but which should really be termed ‘slavery’. We were up against the Mafia and against corrupt officers, at a great risk to our lives. But with God on our side we were able to rescue many girls.

My wife was at the time working for a similar organisation, and she told me of one girl who wanted to be rescued. In Indian culture it’s common for a girl to be shunned by her family once she’s been prostituted, even if it was against her will. But by God’s intervention and grace this girl was not only rescued, but also accepted by her mother back home! Jesus is truly the one “who redeems our life from the pit”.

After years of working with people on the streets, I had a desire to work at a level from which I could have a greater sphere of influence. So I applied for the post of Regional Director with Viva. But it’s not only the position that interested me – it is the work! I had never heard of any organization that works at getting people united to generate a Christian response to any issue, but Viva does!

Sadly, organisations in India are often more than happy to work in isolation, and it’s very difficult to convince them to share information. This is the case in Christian organisations too. What does working together look like in India? As I see it, working together means having a united and strong effort to tackle a particular problem. It means praying for one another, supporting one another, sharing information, encouraging one another by sharing success stories, sounding the alarm on failures, sharing resources – all for one purpose. Only pride prevents us from doing this.

Christians have a biblical command to live in community together, supporting one another in faith and good works; we have another biblical command to care for orphans. It is obvious to me that God reveals his plans in Scripture for us to work together to help children at risk! It’s as simple as working efficiently, and not re-inventing the wheel. God is very practical in some ways. We must not waste time; we must be good stewards of what we’re given. One way to do this is to work together.

Please pray for us. Not only for Viva, but also for other agencies that work for children at risk. We urgently require your prayer. At this very moment, as you read this, one more child is added to the unending list of children at risk … one more girl is being abused and exploited. And if you wait to pray, or even while you make the decision to do it, anything could have happened to this child. Yes, please pray.

~ Nitin Thakor, Regional Director, Viva India

Want to hear more exciting stories about Nitin and our other regional directors? Visit www.viva.org.

If you'd like to join us in prayer for God's work in India, please visit www.viva.org/pray

MDG's Part 3: Combating HIV/AIDS

2010-06-17T09:00:00.002+01:00

Newspapers and scientists sometimes brings us terrifying predictions of worldwide epidemics like SARS, and various kinds of flu from different animals like birds and swine. How about the one that’s already raging across every continent – AIDS? It’s deadly enough to have been included in the Millennium Development Goals … but death isn’t the only result of this disease. The people suffering with AIDS, especially children, are often ostracised and discriminated against because of cultural myths and factual misconceptions. Even schoolchildren whose parents have AIDS suffer this social stigma.

Good thing Viva has teamed up with more than ten international charities to begin to change that! We’re working with World Vision, Compassion, Tearfund and others to deliver training called ‘Let Your Light Shine’ to hundreds of adults who care for children. Let Your Light Shine uses a DVD that teaches caregivers how to provide the best support and care for children suffering under the personal or societal effects of HIV and AIDS. Let Your Light Shine has been specially designed to be useful to churches, orphanages, schools, communities and individual caregivers.

Let your Light Shine includes short documentaries of children who have been living with or affected by HIV/AIDS. It also features 12 educational sections that dispel myths about HIV/AIDS, provide basic facts about the disease, and teach workers how to prevent the spread of the virus. It’s shown by a trained caregiver who helps the viewers understand the needs of sick or orphaned children, and how to prevent AIDS from spreading to healthy children. This doesn’t just improve care for the kids, it also changes local communities by getting correct information out there!

And the amazing thing about using our city-wide networks around Africa is that we’re able to deliver Let Your Light Shine to lots of caregivers at once. In fact, at our first session in Kampala we trained 58 representatives from our network member projects. They went out and told 200 more workers what they’d learned. Those 200 went out and told their own colleagues – 776 of them! So now, through just one day of training from Viva, 1034 caregivers in Kampala know how to care for children suffering from AIDS. We’re pretty confident they’re not keeping the information to themselves, but telling their families and friends how to avoid contracting the disease.

We’ve now trained more than 100 people through our networks in Uganda, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Even if none of those people were to teach someone else (which, of course, we know they have!) that would still translate to approximately 5,000 children receiving better care. Those children will grow up without the damaging cultural prejudices against AIDS sufferers that their peers might have, and they’ll have a better understanding of the disease and how to avoid it.

Working together is key to achieving the Millennium Development Goal of Combating HIV/AIDS. Even if a big organisation like UNICEF could help thousands of people by working alone, it could potentially help millions by making use of city-wide networks of local projects. That’s why we work so hard to pull people together, forming networks of churches and projects and individuals that can be used to get important information out there that can help kids and communities – helping people to let their light shine!

~ K. in Oxford

Would you like to read more about how Viva's response to HIV/AIDS? Visit http://www.viva.org/HIVandAIDS.aspx

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Lukas goes to Uganda

2010-06-14T09:00:00.006+01:00

Last week I went to Uganda on business, something I do a fair bit. But this time I brought my eight-year-old son Lukas along with me. The idea was to show Lukas how people live in other parts of the world, and teach him to be compassionate. Our trip was filled with lessons even before we left – having to get shots before you go to a place is a major lesson in the physical challenges facing the world’s poor!

“Dad, what’s typhoid?”
“Well, it’s a preventable and curable disease that kills 600,000 people every year, and these shots will make sure we don’t catch it.”

While I ran about between meetings in a suit in 30˚ weather, Lukas was working at Sanyu Babies Home (a long-standing member of our Kampala network of projects) helping take care of 16 abandoned babies. Having the CEO of a charity for a dad means you hear lots about orphanages, but actually being in one changed Lukas’ life. Not only was he overwhelmed with the concept of babies having been abandoned by their parents, but he was overwhelmed with the task of taking care of all of them! He spent a day and a half playing with the babies and doing crowd control while the Sanyu ladies fed them. “How was it?” I asked him at the end of the day. “Noisy, but well-managed” was his very serious reply!

One day Lukas went to school. He went to classes for the day at one of Kampala’s boarding schools. Out of 1,500 students there was one white boy – Lukas! He was an object of keen interest and curiosity all day, but had a wonderful time playing with his new friends.

On another day I had a meeting with the leader of a local project. We spent the first little while talking business and roasting in a concrete office block, until I couldn’t handle it anymore and said “How about we go and see some children?!” So she collected Ernest, the largest man I’ve ever encountered, and together with Lukas we all went down into the slums.

This was a huge shock for Lukas. I could see the questions registering on his face: “How many people live in this awful place?” “How do you live off £1 a day?!” We walked through streets lined with rivers of raw sewage. It’s rainy season, and everything was covered in red mud and the smell of hot, wet people /animals /furniture /filth. We stopped in at the home of Lydia, barely four feet tall, mother of four children under five years old, and AIDS sufferer.

Lydia and her kids share a room in a three-room hut with other tenants in the other two rooms. Your bathroom at home is probably larger than their little apartment, and probably has more furniture in it too. I’m sure my enlightened readers have heard of families living in such tiny homes before, but imagine an eight-year-old English kid seeing it firsthand, for the first time. There was one chair shared between all the tenants in the house, and that was brought out for me (to my extreme embarrassment). The room reeked of sweaty humans, soiled mattresses, and hot mud. Lukas bravely didn’t fuss about that.

With translations from Ernest, Lukas heard how Lydia supports her family. In the morning she goes out and buys plantains (“They’re like bananas,” I told him). Then she puts them into her enormous pot, cooks them and mashes them up into ‘matooke’ (pronounced mah-toe-kay). This requires her to collect wood and keep a fire going all day. Then she somehow carries the pot – and I can’t stress how enormous it is, and she’s just the tiniest lady – out to the main highway, where people on their way home stop and buy scoops of matooke for dinner. On a good day she makes about £1. And that has to be enough for everything she and her four children might need.

But wait, Lukas, there’s more! Lydia is getting evicted tomorrow, because her landlord has decided to take down the little mud-walled house of squalor and build something nicer. Lydia doesn’t know what she’ll do; she can’t miss a day of work, she doesn’t know how she’ll dismantle the bunk-bed that her children share, and she can’t afford the deposit of three months’ rent (the equivalent of £12) on a new room. It’s rainy season, where will they go?

And to top it all off, her three-year-old daughter got her eye poked with a stick while playing with some friends. Her cornea has been half ripped off, and her eye is oozing pus. Lydia took her to the hospital but of course couldn’t afford treatment, so the doctor gave her a little bottle of salt water to pour over it. It’s been a few weeks now and the little girl is going blind. Lukas was in a shock of grief over the various horrors going on in this one little family. The thought that this kind of story was common in Uganda horrified him more.

In beautiful, simple, child-like generosity Lukas immediately emptied all the money he had in his pockets (amazingly, about £12 in Ugandan shillings!) and gladly gave that to Lydia to cover the deposit on a new room. And Ernest rounded up some people to help the family move the next day. I was actually in a meeting later on with representatives from our city-wide network and asked if anyone knew an eye doctor. Thanks to the joint efforts of many of the network projects, the little girl went to see a doctor on 7 June and received proper treatment, paid for by the network. (A grand total of just £3! But such a price was impossible for Lydia to spare. And because they could see she had little money, the doctors just never gave her time of day to realise how simple the procedure actually was.) Due to the long time spent without any treatment, though, the little girl might still lose her eye.

So, overall impressions from Lukas? Seeing kids his own age living in squalor, with diseases and constant hunger, broke his heart. But the amazing positive attitude of these kids, who have so little, impressed Lucas and made him appreciate what he has here in Oxford. And that’s why I brought him along … mission accomplished.

~ Patrick McDonald, Viva CEO

Viva is working really hard in Uganda. To find out more about our work there visit www.viva.org/vivaafrica.aspx

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Kids and the World Cup

2010-06-10T11:19:00.001+01:00

Blow your vuvuzela, get flag socks on your wing mirrors, make your way to a fan zone…the World Cup is about to arrive in Africa!

Around South Africa, the atmosphere is reaching fever pitch. Arriving in Johannesburg airport, the first thing I saw was a giant football floating in the air to let everyone know that this was a host city. Fans in all colours were queuing at immigration, the most memorable being a Mexican in his green shirt, big hat, comedy sunglasses and a replica trophy!

So who will win the World Cup? After my next flight to Cape Town, I was whisked to a church in a township that was participating in Viva’s World Weekend of Prayer. I asked the children of the township the same question, and was deafened by the shout of “South Africa!!”

I am privileged to be here for the whole month of madness. Although I’m usually based at Viva’s Africa office in Uganda, I’ve travelled down to work with our city-wide network in Cape Town as they make every effort to keep children safe during the World Cup. The Cape Town network brings together over 90 organisations in the Western Cape area to work on the issues facing South Africa’s children.

One of the most pressing issues across the country is child sexual abuse, and the network members were particularly worried that all the football festivities would lead to an increase in this tragic problem. There is already an extremely high child abuse rate across the country and it is estimated that more than 40,000 people will be trafficked into South Africa during the World Cup to serve the whims of thousands of unscrupulous tourists and locals. South African President Zuma admitted this in a statement on World Cup trafficking, saying "Children wandering alone in shopping malls and football stadiums will be vulnerable to people with evil intentions.” On top of that, many girls looking to make extra money as waitresses or tour guides during the tournament will be fooled into the sex trade. Since the children have now finished school for the 5-week football break, the network has gone into overdrive working with other local community projects to try and ‘Keep Them Safe’.

The network is part of a community initiative to pull together all kind of different projects and churches across Cape Town to set up 13 ‘base camps’. These are 13 centres within communities which have games and play for primary school children in the morning, a workshop choice of performing arts, craft, sport or entrepreneurship for teenagers in the afternoon and big screens for everyone to watch matches in the evenings. One day a week the children will be reaching out through ‘compassion days’, leaving base camp to serve the needs of others. This means that not only will they be carefully looked after and supervised over the five weeks, and thus made much less vulnerable to those ‘people with evil intentions’, but they will also be taught valuable life skills to keep them safe from HIV/AIDS, child abuse and trafficking in the future. 200 local volunteers are facilitating the whole operation that is expected to reach out to over 1800 children and youth each day!

On the eve of the World’s greatest sports tournament and the most ambitious networking initiative I’ve been involved with, I’m looking forward to each and every part of it! Between the football matches and the network’s plans, ‘teamwork’ is certainly the name of the game this summer. So keep an eye on this blog to find out how these tactics help us reach our goal ...

~ E. on the road

Want to find out more about keeping kids safe? Visit www.viva.org.

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Prayer at Work

2010-06-07T15:38:00.004+01:00

God has been hearing from us a lot these past few days. Viva’s World Weekend of Prayer for children at risk was a huge success, with myriad prayer events going on around the world. We’re still waiting for news from many of these events, since it’s not uncommon for the people organising them to have no access to the internet, or even to electricity! But keep an eye on our website, since they’ll be coming through over the next couple weeks.

(Also, if you organised an event, please let us know how it went and what the results were on our feedback form!)

But for now, here are some of the things that went on during the World Weekend of Prayer that people have already told us about...

Livingstone, Zambia: More than 100 children from local projects came together for a prayer event on Saturday, to pray for themselves and other children at risk around the world. Then on Sunday Covenant Community Fellowship Church, also in Livingstone, held a service run by children. During this service children used drama and songs to tell the adults in the congregation about difficulties they face regularly, and then led the adults in prayer for the rest of the service.

Delhi, India: 150 Christian leaders (like church pastors and project leaders) and 50 children got together to pray and worship at Centenary Methodist Church on Saturday. We’re very excited to have so many Christian leaders join forces for this, since as we heard from Nitin in last week’s blog it’s common to find Christian projects trying to ‘go it alone’ in India.

Addis, Ethiopia: More than 250 children at risk from seven projects throughout Ethiopia’s capital city gathered to hold a prayer service at Full Gospel Church. This was the first such event for Ethiopia and they’re planning to run similar ones all over the country next year.

Cape Town, South Africa: Children and grown-ups came together to hold a prayer event where kids learned about trafficking and then prayed for trafficked children and other children at risk. The CONNECT team used great metaphors: the tale of Cinderella and the Bible story of Joseph (of the Technicolour Dream Coat, not Jesus’ dad!) were used to help kids understand trafficking. The children spent the day praying and waiting for answers from Jesus, and then released their prayers (in the form of helium balloons!) at the end of the day.

Kampala, Uganda: The World Weekend of Prayer fell during a month of events focussing on prayer and advocacy, held by our city-wide network. Later this week they’ll release hundreds of helium balloons into the Kampala sky, each one of them with a slip of paper inside teaching the finder how to report abuse and reading, “We’re committed to protecting children – are you?” When the balloons land, the hope is that whoever finds them will write “Yes!” and then send them back to Viva’s Africa office in the mail.

Oxford, UK: At Wokingham Baptist Church, everyone was invited to take off their shoes in order to identify with children at risk, and then shout out prayers or protests. Some examples of shouted protest-prayers: “My feet hurt” and “I don’t want to do this any more!” (meaning kids didn’t want to be miserable and sick, not that they wanted to stop praying!) and “Peanuts!” (from a boy pretending to be a child street-vendor).
And in our International Office, staff members and their families came out on Saturday morning to pray at various stations throughout the office, and spent several hours in worship and prayer.

Did you take a minute to pray, or were you at a prayer event? Go onto our Facebook fan page and let us know, or give us feedback on our website. We’re so excited to hear how God moved in people’s hearts and lives over this World Weekend of Prayer.

~ Prayer Team in Oxford

It’s not too late to pray! Go to www.viva.org/pray.aspx to check out how you can keep praying for children at risk.

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