For my second speech in public speaking we had to an informative speech and I chose the street boys in Peru. I hope you enjoy. Thank you to Billy Greenman and Polly Ricks for their invaluable input.
“Finding food, staying alive, staying hidden. They eat anything...dirt, bricks, any food they can get. They have to sell themselves sexually or steal in order to get money to buy a plate of food or a bowl of soup. They hide out in the daytime to avoid being caught by the police and subsequently are thrown into prison and tortured or taken somewhere to be left to die. I have heard that the average lifespan of a boy on the street is 18 years.” This quote was given to me during an interview of Polly Ricks, a woman who has invested over 12 years of her life to helping the street children on Peru. The term street children is the politically correct term, Peruvian citizens call them “piranhas” and “bastards.” This past summer I was lucky enough to travel to Peru for two weeks and work with Scripture Union Peru outreach to the street boys. It was a slap in the face for sure, I hope to be able to inform you of the challenges, lifestyles, and hardships of these children.
Peru has around 29 million inhabitants. It is hard for the government to get an exact count of the number of street boys because the boys are good at hiding but the estimation is about 250,000 street children are in Peru’s streets. These children are put on the streets for a vast variety of reasons. In Inge Bolin’s book “Child rearing in highland Peru” he explains, “Women do not take a birth control pill or use other preventative methods common in mainstream society, since these are neither affordable nor trusted.” Because of this, many women get pregnant at an early age when they can not provide for the child, and the father most of the time disappears. Usually the first child is kept and raised, but in the years to come more and more children are born into the “family” and the mother is absolutely unable to provide for all of the children, so it is acceptable for the mother to send the first born and the ones she believes have the best chance of survival on the streets out. These children chosen are usually boys no older than six but could be as young as two or three. A common way this happens is the mother takes the children to a busy market far from their home, and purposely loses them in the crowd. Paul Clark, the director of Scripture Union Peru, often uses the illustration of a life boat. “When the boat is full one person needs to go overboard, or the entire boat will sink, and everyone drowns.”
Some children begin spending days on the streets trying to sell small bits of candy, hand-woven bracelets and hats, or they will just simply beg to try to provide income for the family. Many times, they are expected to bring home a certain quota daily, and if they do not meet that quota then they can expect to be beaten. Even when they do bring the proper amount of money home, very seldom does that translate to food on their plates. Billy Greenman, another employee for Scripture Union Peru said, “After awhile, sometimes the boy decides that he would be better off living on his own rather than trying to meet an unreasonable quota and still not getting fed.” Unfortunately the street is no safe haven from the hell that they called home, this situation is the epitome of the term ‘out of the frying pan into the fire.’
So what happens to these boys once they are on the streets? The streets of Peru are no place for people in there teens much less as young as two. The streets are full of gangs, violence, addictions, and death. The option of finding a job for a street boy is not an option at all. The street boys status in the economy is lower than the status of a slave. He has no one, and nothing other than the clothes on his back, if he even has clothes. So, the next reasonable option for the children in stealing for survival. This ranges from pick pocketing to stealing food from the markets. The younger and less experienced children who don’t know how to make a fast get away are usually caught by the police and tortured, when asked to elaborate Greenman said “They are raped and beaten. Boy's have been taken to a dungeon and used as a soccer ball to be kicked around. They have been forced to drink the policeman’s urine. They have been fed sandwiches laced with rat poison, and sadly, the list goes on.” The last option for survival on the streets, sadly, is prostitution. In Peru and all over the world sex trafficking and sex tourism is on the rise. These young boys will extend sexual favors in exchange for a small sum of money or just a plate of food. And the sick thing is, people actually take advantage of them and use them.
At the end of the day, the amount of help available to the children in proportion to the amount of children on the streets is very small. The group I was a part of this past summer has helped many children find the escape they desperately desire from the streets, but that is just a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg that is the help needed. There are many other programs in place similar to Scripture Union Peru dedicated towards helping the boys. When the boys steal and resort to drugs or prostitution, it is to "disaparece" themselves (to disappear themselves from pain, hunger, life) for a few minutes, they can be relieved of all of the horrors of being on the streets...and the thing they hold dear, the only real thing they own is "mi verdad", which is "my truth" or their story of what happened to them in their family and how they came to be thrown out of their home...most will NOT tell you their "verdad" and treasure "mi silencio" as the most deepest secret close to their heart. No one else can own their "truth" or their "silence". This is the one thing they own forever.
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