Hasta Junio

It's been a busy week here in La Paz, but thoroughly exciting watching the new Kaya Center in action. Early tomorrow morning I head back to the States and back to our US office far away from our kids. Though I'll be back here for the summer and I'm in constant contact with everyone via phone and email here while I'm stateside, it's always a bit sad leaving. Here there is daily inspiration and more hugs than I can count, and just enough chaos to keep things interesting.

One of the highlights of the week was meeting the father of one of the kids in our residential program. His son, I., is in the process of transitioning back home, a process which will take some time. This past weekend was his first full weekend visit with his family and by all accounts it went well. The father was checking in with our clinical staff to give them an update of how things went. He was so proud of his son and he told me he saw a marked difference in him since he entered our program. His son spent the weekend talking about school and his goals for the future. Quite a difference, his father noted, from the kid who used to inhale paint thinner and hang out on the streets all day, avoiding school. For his part, the father has been working hard to control his drinking and has secured a good job. He admitted that he's definitely not ready for I. to come home yet, but little by little he is getting there. When the time comes, I. will continue to attend our full day program so that we can continue to support him and his dad as they adjust to being a family once again.

Another highlight was hanging out with some of our newest students, two 12 year old girls. Both are attending our day program while living at home with their families, and neither has ever been to school before. Our clinical staff has been working quite a bit with the girls to help them recognize the dangers of street life and begin pulling away from various street activities. Two days ago, one of the girls announced that for the past 2 weeks, she has not gone out on the streets in the middle of the night - something she was doing regularly. "I made a decision," she said, "I'm not going to do that anymore. I want to focus on school now." While we took this announcement with a grain of salt, having seen many kids make statements like this and then go back on their promises, we nevertheless were extremely proud of this accomplishment and celebrated her decision.

Baby steps. That's what it's all about down here. Each step forward feels like a miracle and is infinitely rewarding.

Now onto the miracle of getting myself out the door and onto the airport at 4am!

Kaya Center Opens in La Paz

This past February marked the opening of the Kaya Center. Through the Kaya Center we offer a full-day therapeutic school program for 3 main categories of children: children living in our residential program, children who have come through our residential program and have been able to return home to their families, and children who have been out of school and on the streets, but who can remain with their families with intensive support.

The full-day program was designed around the unique needs of children who have been heavily involved in street life. Most of these children are years behind academically or have never been to school at all, despite being school-age. And most have suffered multiple forms of abuse and come from severely dysfunctional families. As a result, they are unable to succeed in traditional school environments. In the Kaya Center, children have the opportunity to receive intensive, individualized academic support to help them catch up to grade level, and they work with clinical staff members to address various psychological and emotional issues. Since such issues often surface within the classroom and impede learning, our teachers and clinicians work closely together.

To illustrate, I’ll share an incident that happened just this week. During her language arts class, one of our teachers started to introduce a lesson on word families. Think of the Spanish equivalent of “at, cat, sat, bat, mat…” Hearing the word “family,” one of her students, Miguel*, jumped out of his seat and began screaming. “No!” he yelled, “I don’t want to talk about my family!” He started to cry and refused to participate in the lesson. The situation was resolved fairly easily, since the teacher has a small class and enjoys a close relationship with her students. She was able to assure Miguel that the lesson was about word groups, not families, and he was able to calm down for a few minutes in the therapy room with the psychologist before rejoining the class. The psychologist made a note of the incident and is now meeting with Miguel to help him process his feelings about his family. She also alerted Miguel’s house parents in the residential program about what happened so that they could provide extra support and attention in the evening. This is just one example of the ways in which the Kaya Center provides integrated care to children.

By offering a full-day therapeutic school program, we are now able to better meet the needs of the children in our homes. We are also able to partner with families to reduce the need for residential care. Most children on the streets do have families, but their families are ill-equipped to provide adequate care and supervision for them. They have multiple problems and struggle to survive in extreme poverty. A typical solution is for families to relinquish full responsibility for their children and have them cared for entirely in a residential program, or watch them become fully absorbed into street life and delinquency. Many of these families, however, can provide basic levels of care. One of the primary goals of the Kaya Center, therefore, is to enable families to play an active, positive role in the lives of their children and to work together with them to make sure their children don’t wind up back in the streets. Our hope is that, through the Kaya Center, we can help more children transition back home and back into mainstream schools.

-- Kristin Huang, Executive Director

*Name changed to protect privacy