Discarded, Reclaimed, and Renewed

Rotting garbage covers the ground and the air is thick with acrid smoke, but this is home to hundreds of families with young children.  It is La Chureca, the city dump, located on the outskirts of Nicaragua’s poorer neighbourhoods.  Most of the families live in makeshift shelters pieced together with scraps of wood, plastic, and cardboard.   Children scavenge amidst the broken glass and rotting food, sometimes competing with the dogs and vultures for whatever decaying food may be available.

In Nicaragua, the poorest country in South America, these families are the poorest of the poor.  Exposed to the toxic fumes from the burning trash and the unsanitary conditions all around them, the children suffer from skin diseases, infections, and malnutrition.  Without a proper education, they have little hope of ever leaving this horrible environment.  Some believe that crime is their only way out, so older kids may become involved in drugs, prostitution, or other offenses, often leading to prison.

But PF Nicaragua doesn’t wait until these young people arrive in prison to step in and them.  PF volunteers care for the very young children during the day, both to remove them from the dangers of the city dump and to allow their mothers an opportunity to work outside of the home and hopefully begin earning enough to move their families away from the rancid trash of La Chureca.

“We have taken 750 children out of La Chureca,” says Monsignor Luis Peña, PF Nicaragua Board Chairperson.  “Our objective is giving these children an education, giving them a way out of a place where children don’t belong.”  PF Nicaragua runs a day care and school for the children, offering them nutritious meals and a clean safe environment.  The very young, ages three months to three years, can nap, eat, and play at the nursery.  The older children receive schooling, which even includes a computer centre featuring 18 computers.  Here the children learn that, despite the challenges of their poverty, they can seek a better life through education, not through crime.  “A child without an education is a child that is destined to hate and to want revenge,” Monsignor Peña concludes.  “This programme stops that.”

Rescuing these children from spending their days in the city’s putrid garbage dump does more than change their present lives, it also changes their futures.  “The idea was to … stop these people from ending up in hospitals, in prisons or even the graveyard,” Monsignor Peña admits.

Some of these children have a family member in prison, and PF Nicaragua works to save their lives and change their futures as well.  Nicaragua’s overcrowded prisons, like many in South America, have been notorious for violence and gang fighting.  When PF Nicaragua first formed and requested permission to work inside the prisons, prison staff told them that between eight and ten prisoners were stabbed every week.  Despite the grim statistics, for the first six month’s that PF staff and volunteers were working inside the prison not one prisoner lost his life.  “Whatever you are doing, keep doing it,” a prison official told Monsignor Peña.

Sadly, prison violence has increased since those first few months, due to continued overcrowding severely confining living quarters and placing rival gang members in close proximity, but PF’s presence continues to make a difference, because inmates sense the love and concern the PF workers offer.  “It’s a surprise to the inmates when they first feel the love of Christ,” says Doraestela, a PF Nicaragua volunteer.  “The love we give them is one they’ve never received before.”  

PF runs several programmes inside the prison, including celebrating “The Day of the Inmate,” hosting family parties for children to visit their incarcerated parents, and even taking women inmates outside the prison for a retreat to enjoy the fresh air and beauty of the beach.  But it is the love the PF workers share more than the programmes they operate that creates a change in the prisoners’ lives.  “Our main goal in the prison is to spread the Word of the Lord,” says Monsignor Peña.  Often it’s simply their presence, not their own words, that does that best.