We will be having a presentation on the social and economic realities facing children and teenagers in Bolivia. It is a young nation: 4 out 10 persons in Bolivia are children (up to age 12) or adolescents (ages 12 to 18).
In the rural areas, some children live with their mother, father, and grandparents; they are engaged in agricultural activities, but they can go to school. Other children live only with one parent, usually the mother, or with their grandparents alone, because the father or both parents have migrated to the cities to work. In this environment they grow up with their native language (Aymara, Quechua, etc.) and their own culture, and they develop their abilities around agricultural works. At many times they do not attend school, or they abandon studies at an early age because they have to work to support their families. Girls bear the brunt of privation, being poor, indigenous, and female living in the country—among the most excluded social groups in Bolivia, according to a UNICEF report.
In the urban areas and at their perimeters, there are girls and boys who grow up only with their mothers or with their grandparents or aunts or uncles, because their parents have migrated to other countries. Many of these children go to support centers to get help with their studies because their parents didn’t have access to education, or because their grandparents cannot help them with their school activities. These children live in a situation of poverty and privation: in fact, 6 out of every 10 children and adolescents here are considered poor from a multidimensional point of view.
Many girls and boys are abandoned, or they live on the streets. These children are left vulnerable to recruitment into gangs, thievery, and addiction. Around 10,000 children are living on the streets, mainly in the cities of Santa Cruz, La Paz, and Cochabamba.
There are girls and boys that work because of poverty, migration, and abandonment by their families. They work in sugar fields, they work in mines, they are fishers, they do construction or carpentry, they sell alcohol, they collect trash, they clean hospitals, they do manual work in buildings, and so on. Their monthly pay is 300 to 600 bolivianos ($43 to $86). They suffer much from exploitation, but their families press them into labor anyway. And many employers prefer to work with children because their labor is cheap.
There are many girls and boys who live in shelters. Many of them are orphans or have been abandoned; they suffer physical and mental infirmities; their parents are incarcerated; or they have suffered abuse and maltreatment in their families. In addition to Nuestra Casa, the shelter for girl survivors of sexual abuse, where I help out, there are many other shelters in Cochabamba where the language students volunteer.
There are children growing up in the prisons. About 1,000 minors live with one of their parents in prison.
There are other children growing up in the open-air markets. La Cancha is a space in which many families practically live all the day long in the market. There, the children band together and form groups that provide play and accompaniment. These children are cared for, not only by their parents and grandparents but by all the adults who make a living in this extensive space.
Life is hard and often cruel to children from infancy. It is reported that 83 percent of minors suffer some form of physical or psychological violence at home or at school. In some cases the level of violence causes physical incapacity and sometimes death. Every day the police receive three cases of sexual abuse of girls and teenagers, and the actual number of incidents occurring daily is probably much higher. In recent years girls and boys have been kidnapped into human trafficking or had their organs harvested.
At the same time, there are other girls and boys who live in economic comfort, provided by their migrant parents, who compensate for their absence by sending money and luxuries. Many of these children live in isolation, indifferent to the suffering of others.
Finally, there are girls and boys who grow up in good economic conditions, with much care and attention, enjoying loving protection from their parents and grandparents.
In all cases, the face of hope is seen in the development of children and teenagers in whatever social and economic circumstances, in their resilience, and in the advances society is making to protect their rights to health, education, and basic social services.
Bolivia does have laws to protect children and adolescents from all forms of abuse, including legislation against family violence and legislation against human trafficking. The nation is striving to reduce infant mortality, malnutrition, and school dropouts. There is much more work that needs to be done to enforce the laws and guarantee access to social services.
Thanks ahead of time to Carla Bazoalto Olmos, who works on the mission formation staff here at Maryknoll, for her presentation and for this outline that I have just summarized for you.
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