Nuevo Video de Abenin

Un nuevo video sobre infancia y guerra de la ONG Abenin, con sedes en España y Colombia.

Evaluation, Paraguay

This year, Shine a Light is doing an extensive evaluation of the successes and failures of our work over the last decade, so I have been interviewing many of the children and teenagers we have taught to make music and video, as well as with the organizations that serve them.  I'll be posting a couple of updates on this process, starting with an interview yesterday with several people who work in the Paraguayan national government.

In 2008 and 2009, we worked with advisors to the new Paraguayan president, Fernando Lugo, on developing new strategies and policies for work with marginalized children, and then helped to create a film school for street kids and indigenous kids.  The consequences have been fantastic:

• Thanks to a proposal we developed with child leaders in 2008, there is now a 2500 member children's national assembly which proposes policy and evaluates and audits national policy.
• Our suggestion to emphasize the arts in work with marginalized children has resulted in the creation of music, theater, and visual arts programs serving 13,000 kids
• Though the film school itself never gained enough funding to be permanent, local filmmakers inspired by the project have worked with the government and a dozen NGOs to train kids as filmmakers and actors.
• This week, several street kids from Paraguay traveled to Berlin to present their film, Calle Última, at the Berlin Film Festival, a stunning honor.

I'll continue to update the results of our evaluation (not all of which will be so glowing, I trust) as they come in.

Observatorio de la Infancia, Venezuela

La tragedia de la infancia en Venezuela no está llegando a los medios de comunicación internacionales, pero hay niveles espantosos de violencia en el país.  Un recurso esencial para entender el problema es El Observatorio de la Infancia y Juventud en Caracas: http://observatoriodeinfanciayjuventud.blogspot.com/

Performing Life

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John Connell poses with his juggling students at a park in Cochabamba, a city of 600,000 in central Bolivia. He arrived in the country as a teenager to visit his girlfriend, who had been an exchange student at his high school. Children in his program are required to attend school.

Jocelyn Wiener

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A good story in the Christian Science Monitor on Performing Life, a small organization in Bolivia with which Shine a Light has worked several times.  Read it here.