roundup

Recently, I've been helping take some of the guys from the bridge to work at Nate's carpentry shop in the afternoons.  And when I went to pick them up today, a little bit later than usual, I found about 10 cops rounding up all the kids that were working in the intersection washing car windows and watching cars outside the market.  The cops had about 15 kids (including a little 11 year old) lined up facing the wall with their arms above their heads and their legs spread.  So I ducked into a grocery store to watch the scene from inside.  The cops frisked the kids, pushed them around a bit, and then dragged them across the street and piled them into the back of a pick-up truck that was parked right outside the grocery store.   

It's always good for the kids to not be on the streets doing drugs, but these roundups don't really help.  The kids get roughed up and dumped in homes or kept locked up for a day or two, but they always make their way back to the streets. 

I thought there might have been some kids up at the bridge, but I didn't want to risk get caught in the middle of a police raid.  So I called one of the girls (yes, even street kids have cell phones), and was relieved to hear that they were away from the bridge washing clothes.  

It'll be interesting to see who's back in the next few days.  I'm just praying that they don't come back with bruises and broken noses.  

what's wrong with your face?

I let the street kids use my cell phone anytime they want to call their families.  Some of the kids want to call more often than others.  And since January, one of the boys has asked to call his mom in La Paz every time I've seen him.  Initially, he would call and ask her to come pick him up, but when it became clear that she wasn't going to do that, he started talking about going up there.  I kind of blew it off because so many of the kids make passing remarks about going back to live with their families.  But at the night shelter this past Friday, he pulled out a plastic envelope that was full of coins he had saved from washing car windows over the past 2 months. He counted 160 Bs. and said that he was going to buy new clothes this weekend and bus fare to La Paz, and he asked if I'd go with him to buy his ticket on Monday.  That night, he was so excited that he was almost giddy.  

He's been on the streets for 4 years.  He left his home when he was only 13 because his mom beat him.  The rough life he's lived on the streets can be seen in the scars on his face.

He called me at 7am on Sunday morning to ask if I'd meet him to go to the bus terminal, but by the time I got to the corner where the kids hang out he had already left.  He called me later that day around 3pm from La Paz to let me know he had made it there and was going to see his mom.  I told him that I was so proud of him and so happy for him.  I can't think of a much better ending than kids being reunited with their families.  

When I went up to the bridge yesterday morning and climbed into the tunnel, I was shocked to find that this boy had already come back from La Paz and was under the bridge with a glue bottle held to his nose.  We walked out into the sunshine to talk, and I could see a look of total hopelessness, pain, and rejection in his eyes.  He was very somber when he explained to me how his mother had rejected him when he showed up in La Paz.  After 4 years of not seeing her son, she had looked at him and said, "What's wrong with your face?"   

So on Monday he took a bus back to Cochabamba because there's no other place for him go.

connections

Connecting with Mosoj Yan has been a real blessing, and I'm so glad to have a place to bring the girls where they can get encouraged and cared for spiritually and emotionally.  The girls spend the day at their Motivation Center, and I do follow-up discussions/activities with them at the night shelter and on weekends.  The night shelter has been incredibly supportive of all this, and Mosoj Yan is even sending over a new girl to sleep there who is only 12 years old.  And even though none of the girls from the bridge made it to the Center everyday this week simply because their addictions to the street are so strong, I'm still encouraged by the improvement that I see and the relationships that we're building.

I've also connected with a church in the center of town that has a real heart to reach out to the kids on the street.  I've gone there for 2 Sundays with several kids from the bridge, and I've been really blessed to see people at the church warmly welcome kids from the street.  I met with the youth pastor on Monday, and he asked if I'd go over there tonight to talk with the youth group about the possibility of the some of them getting involved in outreach to the kids.  They've done a couple of projects for kids from the Coronilla but aren't sure how to keep up a continued relationship with them.  So I'm hoping to help connect them with the group from the bridge in some long-term ministries.  

something positive.

This morning I took the girl I wrote about in my last post to Mosoj Yan to start the process of entering into their girls' home.  She's recovered from her sickness but is still far from healthy due to malnutrition and drugs.  She and I have been talking for over a week now about getting her into a home and off the streets, and as of last Thursday, she had decided that enough was enough and wanted out.

She's a really sweet, beautiful girl, who's only been on the streets for a couple of years.  Her mom was put in prison and her step-dad forced her out of the house at gun point when she was 12.  We found out on Saturday that her mom has been released from prison and is back in Bolivia, in the southern town of Tarija.  

She immediately wanted to get to Tarija and said she was going to steal cell phones to pay for her trip down there. I was able to talk her out of that and encourage her to stick to our plan of talking to Mosoj Yan today.  I said we should coordinate with them, help her get off drugs and get healthy, locate her mom, and then I could take her down to Tarija.

She came to church with me yesterday but left halfway through, and I was concerned that she had gone off to steal and ditch town.  But thank God, this morning she was curled up in the tunnel and still wanted to go to Mosoj Yan.  

On the way, she told me about a situation that happened last night, which may have helped reinforce her urge to get off the street.  She and another boy were hanging around some food kiosks near the bridge when a couple of guys offered them a hamburger.  They took it and walked off to the corner while the two guys stood and watched. She told me that she and the boy she was with felt really uncomfortable by the way the guys were watching them and encouraging her to eat the burger.  She said that something seemed odd about the hamburger, so they broke it open and found that the meat was a weird color and right in the middle of the burger were pills.  PILLS!  Those guys were trying to drug her, to do God only knows what to her.  I can't even begin to express how much that infuriates me...  But it did give me a good opportunity to talk with her about the dangers of living on the streets.

Thankfully, she's totally, 100% into getting help from Mosoj Yan.  So for the first month, she's going to go to their Motivation Center everyday from 8 to 6, and she'll continue to sleep at the night shelter.  I'll help facilitate all that and follow up with her at the shelter- encourage her, make sure she's not sniffing glue at night, etc.  Once they think she's ready, she can enter into their girls' home.  And from there, we can locate her mom and help them reconnect.

There is a very real battle going on for these kids' souls, and she needs a lot of prayer right now. So please be praying that this isn't just a fleeting desire and that she won't get sucked back into life on the streets.  

blood

Bolivian hospitals never cease to amaze me.  I don't know how they accomplish anything because the system is so backwards and the staff is incredibly unorganized.  I spent most of this week at the hospital, and every time I go, there seems to be some new ridiculous thing that blows the other ridiculous things out of the water.  Last night, I found myself cutting through dark hallways carrying an open vile of blood, which was resting precariously inside a hole on the top of a cardboard box that was wrapped in shiny, "happy birthday" wrapping paper...

Yesterday evening, I came across one of the girls who I hadn't seen in a few days and noticed that she was really sick.  She was complaining of excruciating pain in her feet, her back, and her joints and could barely move.  So I took her to the pediatric emergency room because she's only 14.  She was running a fever of 104 and had an open, bloody throat infection that every doctor in emergency wanted to see.  Two hours later, the doctors finally give her something to lower the fever, which helped her joints start to loosen up.

One of the ladies from the night shelter is taking the girl back to the hospital today to pick up her blood work and get some specific treatment. We're hoping to get her into a girls' home, but we were told we'd have to wait until Wednesday because this weekend is Carnaval.  

This girl is only 14 but is already smoking crack cocaine on a fairly regular basis.  Her mom ditched the kids and took off to Buenos Aires a little over 2 years ago, so she and her sister are both on the streets in Cocha.  Both sisters come and go from the bridge quite often.

The girls are definitely more transient than the guys.  They come and go every few weeks or days but tend to stay in specific areas. I really need to get a foot in the door with some other groups in different parts of the city where the girls stay.  The problem is that some of those areas are incredibly dangerous, and I can't just go barging in.  So I'm praying for open doors.

a police station with a pool?

It's weird how crisis situations become everyday events down here...

Yesterday, I went out to a home for street couples to visit some kids I know there and to find out some information about one of the missing girls, whose boyfriend and son are still at the home.  The last time I saw this girl was about 3 weeks ago when she showed up on the street, having escaped from the home because her boyfriend was strangling her.  Nobody at the home had any information about where she might be, and in fact, they were all hoping that I had come with news.  

I remember meeting two of the couples who are at the home back when they lived down by the bus terminal in the spring.  They're older and really rough (seriously, they used to scare me), but I'm really happy that I'm becoming friends with them.  I was talking with the girls and searching for some info about the 2 girls that I'm trying to locate.  Thanks to all their experience on the streets, they were able to give me a few different locations on the south side of town where the girls might be.  But they told me that I shouldn't go, especially at night, even though that would be the best time to find the girls.  One girl said to watch out because there are rapists around there and that a guy tried to rape her one time not too long ago.  Great...  The girl's boyfriend and one of the women want to talk to the director of the home and see about getting out for the afternoon to go looking for the girl.  If that gets worked out, then I'll tag along to some of these scarier places, but I'm not planning any solo rescue operations.

While we were talking about all that, I got a call from another girl on the street who I've bee helping for a few months.  She was hysterical, because her boyfriend had just beaten the crap out of her.  So I left the home and jumped on a bus back to the city.  I got to the corner where all the kids were right in time to see a police SUV come speeding up and squeal to a stop.  She had finally called the cops on her boyfriend, because it was a little different this time.  He wasn't high or drunk when he beat her up; he was just mad.  So he punched her in the face 4 or 5 times and broke her nose.  Then, he kicked her in the back when she was down on the ground.  Unfortunately, he escaped on a bus just a split second before the cops arrived. 

The kids have had so many run-ins with the cops in the past few weeks, that I was immediately on edge.  But thankfully, the two cops that showed up were only interested in helping the beat-up girl and didn't harass the kids for loitering on the bank lawn or having obviously concealed glue bottles.  I rode in the back of the police SUV with her to the Family and Women Protection Brigade to file a denuncia (a police report that also serves as a restraining order) against her boyfriend, which I've been trying to get her to do for months.

Bolivia never ceases to amaze me, and this visit to the police station was no different.  The building was dump built ages ago and never kept up, with sagging ceilings and creaking, loose floor boards.  Florescent lights had been added at some point, and the walls were painted pastel pink and covered with dirty hand prints and yellowed signs.  And the cherry-on-top was an old, empty pool in the courtyard/parking lot.

Before they would interview her, the police sent us out to buy a manilla file folder for the paperwork they were filling out.  That's right.  They don't provide file folders in Bolivia.  Out by the front gate, we found a little tienda selling candy, coke, gum, and...manilla file folders.  

So after she talked with the cops and filled out paperwork, I took her over the hospital to get looked at.  We found out that the forensic doctor she needs to see, as per police orders, wasn't in, but the the doctors in the emergency room were able to give her a shot for the pain (after we went across the street to the pharmacy to buy the vile of pain medication).  

So I still need to figure out how I'm going to get down to where the the 2 missing girls are.  And in the meantime, I have to find a way to juggle all the craziness with the other girl and her abusive ex-boyfriend.  

I'm planting some seeds in her head about relocating to Santa Cruz...

hole in the wall

The police in this country have no grace for the kids on the street.  

This morning, some of the guys from the bridge were roughed up by the cops, taken to the police station, and then released a few hours later.  I'm really not sure what purpose it served...  The whole thing frustrates me because the police were harassing some of the better guys- ones who are trying to work and improve their lives.  

Based on the events of this morning and on all the rumors about police round-ups that they've heard, the kids decided to abandon the bridge for a few days.  And since kids living on the streets are often quite ingenious, I wasn't surprised when I stumbled upon a group of guys packed like sardines and hiding from the rain in an ATM booth under construction.

The hole in the wall.

11 boys and 2 dogs