Girl saved from trafficking in Nepal.

“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.

Breaking taboos in Bangalore.

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.”

Simon says ... keep children safe!

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. 

Big Heart for Cochabambinas

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.

El Salvador Launches New Strategy Against Child Abuse

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.

Running for Their Lives

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.

Saved from Slavery... by a Sandwich Cart

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.)

You Voted for it: Helping Pakistan Heal

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.

Why Does a Zebra Cross the Road?

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.

What does God think about Child Abuse?

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.

Attention World!

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.