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tortillaconsal punto/dot com
By Karla Jacobs, October 28th
| A month ago, on September 21 the government launched a new social program, "Programa Amor," which, among other things, aims to reintegrate 25,000 street kids into the community again by 2011. The program will be coordinated by the Council of Communication and Citizenship | |
| It will involve the collaboration of the Ministries of the Family, Health, Education and Governance as well as the Nicaraguan Institute of Social Security (INSS) and the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman. With the launching of "Programa Amor" these six institutions, under the supervision of the Executives' Council of Communication and Citizenship, come together to form the National System of Social Wellbeing, which will be responsible for carrying out coordinated actions to guarantee the welfare of society's most vulnerable members. |  |
"Convinced that the family is the heart of our sovereign land," reads the introduction of the program's plan presented by the government, "the Government of Reconciliation and National Unity is committed ... to consolidating the moral and spiritual values that society needs to grow in humanity. "Programa Amor is part of the government's commitment to promote and defend children's and young people's rights to free education, health care, security, sport, culture, recreation and happiness. ... [The program] aims to restore the right to a happy and dignified children."
The plan identifies the programs five fundamental objectives;
- To restore children's right to grow up in normal conditions without being exposed to risks associated with living and/or working on the street;
- To restore children's right to be loved and cared for by a family;
- To create and rehabilitate Child Development Centers (professional créches) to provide day care for the children of working mothers;
- To restore children's right to be registered in the civil register;
- To ensure the right to specialized attention for children and young people with disabilities.
After carrying out a six month pilot program of social work with street children, the government estimates that there are approximately 25,000 children and adolescents living and working on the streets in Nicaragua. Based on the progress made during the six month pilot program Marcía Ramírez, Coordinator of "Programa Amor," believes the objective to reintegrate those 25,000 children into society by the end of 2011 to be realistic.
One hundred social workers will be involved in this part of the project and will be responsible for accompanying the children and young people at school, at home and in the community ensuring sufficient support is available to keep the children in school. The social workers will also be responsible for helping the families of the street kids create a steady source of income with the provision of accessible credits. Currently social workers are working in this way with 4,000 street kids in Managua and plan to extend the program to include Granada, Estelí, Jinotega and Matagalpa at the beginning of 2009.
The right to be loved and cared for by a family
Currently in Nicaragua there are 2,967 children in Centers of Special Protection (children's homes). According to the government, 80% of these children are there simply as a result of the situation of extreme poverty faced by their families. Marcía Ramírez, believes that the right to be brought up within a loving family is a fundamental human right and that "poverty should not be a criteria" on which to base the decision to put a child in a home. "Programa Amor" therefore aims to work towards the possibility of returning all 2,374 children in children's homes for reasons of poverty to their original family homes. Social workers will work with the families and the children prior to this move and the program will provide support including free professional daycare to help parents to deal with their situation and care for their children.
"Programa Amor" is also working towards consolidating a network of over 700 foster and adoptive families where children who are unable to return to their biological families can be placed. Also as part of the program two specialized Children Protection Centers in Managua will be rehabilitated. According to Ramírez, however, these homes will be used only as a last resort and children will be placed there for the shortest period of time possible. Ramírez has faith that Nicaraguan society will prove itself able to provide loving homes for the children currently in care given the example of the 50,000 war orphans that Nicaraguan families welcomed into their homes during the 1980s.
Government funded créches for the children of working mothers
During its first 20 months of government, the Ortega administration has built or rehabilitated 22 Children Development Centers (professional créches) in towns and cities across the country, and is in the process of building or rehabilitating 18 more. The aim is to have 100 such centers with a total capacity to care for 10,000 children up and running by the end of 2011. These centers provide professional childcare free of charge for the children of working mothers in impoverished neighborhoods. Hundreds of similar community run créches are being set up and maintained with government funds in rural areas. The founding of hundreds of government funded créches, known as CDIs, during the 1980s is one of the most memorable benefits the first FSLN government provided for many impoverished families.
The right to an identity
The government estimates that at least 50,000 children in Nicaragua do not have birth certificates. In order to restore children's right to be registered in the civil registry the Ministry of Health (MINSA) is working towards the installation of civil registration facilities in all hospitals and health centers where births are attended. In coordination with the Councils of Citizen Power (CPCs) the Ministry of the Family (MIFAMILIA) will arrange house to house visits in communities across the country to locate and those families who have been unable to register their children and to facilitate registration. The Ministry of Education (MED) will be responsible for ensuring that all children in primary school have birth certificates.
The right to specialized attention for children with disabilities
In order to provide specialized attention for children and young people with disabilities "Programa Amor" aims to built and equip 20 specialized centers in hospitals around the country. In an attempt to reduce the number of children born with disabilities, MINSA will incorporate educational content about how to avoid certain disabilities in unborn children into its pregnancy support program.
The program's plan is undeniably extremely ambitious, but Coordinator Marcía Ramírez, a social worker specializing in family therapy and social psychology, believes its objectives are not unrealistic. In an interview published in the weekly newspaper El 19 on October 2, Ramírez, talks at length about why she believes the program will achieve those objectives. Below is a translation of extracts from this interview.
El 19: You [helped to coordinate] one of the most successful programs of the Revolution, [which aimed to] guarantee children's basic rights. How do you feel about your mission in these new times?
Marcía Ramírez: It is a much greater challenge because the problems facing our children and teenagers have become so much more complicated. During the last decade and a half Nicaraguan families have faced unemployment, the deterioration of basic services, migration, etc. All of this has an impact on a family's quality of life and on the relationships within that family and results in a high proportion of children unable to attend school, high levels of violence, abuse, drug addiction and alcoholism, gangs, among other things.
El 19: What's the overall focus of the program.
Marcía Ramírez: It is based on a broad strategy aiming to prevent situations that result in the violation of children's rights. The program takes into account all ages and all the situations of potential risk: children of working mothers aged 0 - 6 in the country and in the town, street kids, those deprived of the love and care of a family, those who have some kind of disability and those who are not registered in the civil register.
The program constitutes an integrated policy of care for children and teenagers based on the articulation of efforts by different state institutions, specialized national organizations and international cooperation agencies willing to establish alliances in order to work towards restoring basic rights.
The central element of the program is the recuperation of the right to education. In this sense, the program constitutes a real and effective strategy for poverty reduction which, combined with measures which allow parents to create sources of income, will permit effective results in the short and medium term.
El 19: What do you think about the integration between the government and the CPCs and the participation of families and communities in this struggle to reduce the levels of poverty suffered by children?
Marcía Ramírez: I think it represents the only possible way to transcend welfarism and achieve sustainable results. The type of sustainability I am talking about is not necessarily financial, but more to do with the transformation of society's attitudes so that we come to consider the fulfillment of children's basic rights as a responsibility shared by families, communities, educational institutions, central government and local governments.
El 19: You were responsible for one of the most successful programs in terms of the restoration of children and teenagers' rights in the first Sandinista government. How would you describe that experience?
Marcía Ramírez: It represented a wonderful opportunity to dream, and to convert those dreams into reality. We conceived an idea, a proposal for care and attention, with the certainty that we could count on the full support of the government to make it happen. That certainty motivated our workers to make a commitment to the program which guaranteed high quality care and attention. We created a network of day care services across literally the whole country, starting from zero, which was where we found ourselves in 1979. We created access to day care for 37,000 children in the countryside and in the towns.
El 19: What was the most positive experience of the psychosocial work you participated in during the ten years of the first revolutionary government?
Marcía Ramírez: The experience with foster and adoptive homes. The network of foster homes was the initiative of a comrade called Gealili Giacoman, who directed the Rolando Carazo Center where we cared for children under the age of six who had been abandoned or orphaned.
Together with a priest from Rama, Gealile started to place some of the children with campesino families. I remember that she used to come back from the follow up visits visibly excited by how naturally the family took in the child, and how in such a short space of time children were able to overcome the psycological problems that inevitably haunt children in institutionalized homes. That is how the network of foster homes started growing across the country and is still active today with about 300 members.
I think that was the most wonderful part because it made is possible to rescue one of the values most deeply rooted within Nicaraguan families: the ability to open their homes to welcome a new member as if he were a biological son.
Along the same lines, the adoptions were another very satisfying experience. The best evidence of the fact that it is our duty to establish work methods capable of guaranteeing that all children have the right to grow up within a loving family, is to meet with some of the children who were adopted during that period, who today are professional adults and responsible parents.
El 19: And what was the most difficult?
Marcía Ramírez: My work with war victims. It was very painful to work with a young person condemned to the rest of his life in a wheel chair because of a bullet wound in his spine, and to watch him being consumed by depression, without being able to do much to alleviate his suffering. Although, with time, we did achieve a lot with them, in training programs and workplace reintegration programs. But it was difficult.
El 19: How will you apply your immense experience to "Programa Amor"?
Marcía Ramírez: With what I consider to be the key to effectiveness within social work: to start from the people you are working with, their culture, their vision of the world, their knowledge and their skills, within a framework of respect and the fundamental aim of positive results.
The starting point, in this sense, is the teams of social workers. At every level, the program's workers and their clients will have the possibility to make proposals and to collaborate. The program's strategy will be a collective construction, adapted and improved everyday with participative mechanisms.
El 19: How do you plan to carry out this very sensitive work in a world and in a society so different [to that of the 1980s] where we need to rebuild values, specifically to raise awareness about rights, and the need for humanity and solidarity ... ?
Marcía Ramírez: Like I said, the focus of the program is preventative, which implies extensive work on the appreciation of values throughout the education system, from the earliest age. This work should be accompanied with creative processes of popular education using all available spaces to promote relationships of respect and equality within the family, methods of bringing up children without violence, and responsible parenthood, among other things.
We have to convert the country into one big school for the formation of values so as to recuperate our cultural essence as a people of great solidarity with a tradition of care and respect for its elderly, a people that was capable of taking into its homes the 50,000 orphans from the war of liberation.
El 19: [The FSLN government] believes that children deserve, that they have the right, to live with the love of a family. How did we make that happen [in the 1980s]? And how will we be doing that today?
Marcía Ramírez: In the 1980s we worked with the philosophy that even the most luxurious children's home is not capable of substituting the love of a family, even if that family is impoverished. We promoted a broad network of day care services but only used two children's homes where children spent the least possible time until we found an alternative. As part of that approach we facilitated the adoption process and were very flexible in the placement of children with the adoptive families we had judged suitable until the administrative procedures of the adoption had been completed. That made it possible for many abandoned children to avoid spending any time in a children's home. This sort of adoption resulted in the most affectionate relationships between the adopted child and his new family.
El 19: Why do you believe that so many children's home exist today in Nicaragua? When and for what purposes are they valid?
Marcía Ramírez: During the 16 years [of neo liberal government] groups of kind hearted people, faced with the absence of government policies, tried to provide an answer to the evident needs of vulnerable children. In a country without child protection policies or regulatory systems [of child protection] it is logical that [so many children's home should have been set up].
A specialized approach is required in dealing with children living in children's homes because [the experience] affects the very foundations of their personalities; their identity and the feeling of belonging linked to the need to receive affection, something which is just as important as receiving food. It is precisely in this regard, in the fulfillment of a child's need for affection, where children's homes present their principal limitation. It is a complex and difficult task to fulfill the personal needs of a growing child in an institution where dozens of other children and young people reside.
However, there will always be children who for diverse reasons cannot be brought up by their own family. And there will be situations when it is necessary to place children in a home for a short period before placing them with a family, either within their own extended family or with a foster or adoptive family. But to allow a child to reach adulthood without a family to call his own is to deny him a fundamental human right.
Poverty should not be a criterion on which to base the decision to put a child in a home. Children living in extreme poverty should be attended in day care. "Programa Amor" works along the lines of this philosophy.
El 19: After returning 80% of the children currently in children homes, the ones who have been placed there for reasons of extreme poverty, how do you envisage the work of the existing children's homes?
Marcía Ramírez: I envisage work being done in alliances. A process of putting all our different experiences together. Together and committed to fulfilling the rights of our children we will be able to invest resources and combine efforts so as to create a model designed to meet children's personal needs.
We are going to meet the objective of zero children on the streets by 2011. We did it under extremely complicated circumstances [in the 1980s], and I think that today we can and should do it better today.
El 19: How are you personally, and your team of social workers going to work towards achieving this objective?
Marcía Ramírez: With the implementation of a process based on participative and efficient planning where every action is carried out with a view to achieving an intermediate goal until reaching the final objective of a healthy, happy child who is doing well at school.
To achieve this implies working directly with the child in psycho-pedagogic, cultural and recreational activities, supporting his family so they are able to reinsert themselves into some kind of economic activity, and working with the educative system to procuring the use of teaching methods which take into account the affect living on the streets has had on these children.
Social workers will take on the responsibility of identifying, accompanying and providing support for individual children and their families and will work with staff at the school the child goes to and with other existing social networks in order to create a network of support to keep the child in school.
El 19: As a specialist in social psychology, how do you think that we can work together to build better relationships within Nicaraguan families and within our society in general?
Marcía Ramírez: We need to recuperate and/or develop the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and accept that person as he is, his ways of thinking and feeling. I think that would be the starting point. As for how to do it, only through dialogue, communication within couples, the family, the community, within the country as a whole. We must learn to live in harmony despite our different ways of thinking.