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Cidade do Panamá – Dez andares acima, crianças fazem uma pausa no jogo de futebol para espiar por cima do telhado sem grades de um colossal prédio de apartamentos azul-petróleo. Um homem nu é visível de uma janela do quarto andar. Atrás, um rio serve de refúgio para usuários de drogas, e um repositório para as armas que membros de gangues jogam pelas janelas quando a polícia aparece.
This is the center of Curundú, a Panama City neighborhood of 16,000 where the homicide rate at one point reached 151 per 1,000— more than 15 times the “epidemic” level as determined by the World Health Organization.
The Panamanian government is intent on lowering rates of violent crime in the country, and it’s changing the way it engages with neighborhoods like this one. With support from Creative Associates International’s Youth at Risk Program, conhecido localmente como Alcance Positivo, there is a new focus on community policing and youth engagement.
In fact the police are here today, somewhere in the bare-wire bowels of this massive 1200-apartment complex. They are not responding to anything, says Officer Teodoro Gomez. “Just talking.”
With patient emphasis on getting to know community members and working with them to solve problems, Gomez reports that crime here has gone noticeably down, and switched to mostly minor offenses.
Kids who never used to come out to play for fear of getting shot today scoot happily around a rusted playground in the courtyard.
They are also willing to walk, sometimes with police protection, to one of two nearby Youth Outreach Centers sponsored by Creative, local churches and NGOs and private companies.
Some of the Centers, like the Calidonia Outreach Center run by Pastor Andreas Fischer and his wife Kathy, have found especially inventive ways to engage them.
Children and teens come here to play ping-pong, futebol, foosball and karate, get help with homework and learn English and computer skills.
They also get to be movie stars.
The Fischers lead 10 ou 12 teenagers at a time to write, produzir, film and star in their own self-directed videos. Kids from warring neighborhoods collaborate on scripts, scout for locations and props and recruit extras together. After it’s edited, they put on a big opening night and invite the community to watch the final product.
“We do it to give the kids a voice of their own so they can express what they live,” says Pastor Fischer. “We feel it’s important for those kids that they have a success story to talk about.”
The last time he did an open air screening at night, residents screamed so loudly he had to replay the movie a second time after they’d calmed down.
The Calidonia Youth Outreach Center is in a gang-neutral zone at the confluence of several poor, violent neighborhoods including Curundú. That means kids don’t have to cross gang lines to get there. But it also means the Fischers are working with young people who need a tremendous amount of support.
For many of the teenagers, working on the film is the first time they take on a project and actually complete it.
“We believe that any person, any teenager in any circumstance, can change. They all have a future. They all have talents,” diz Fischer. “We want to help them realize who they are and separate their thinking from the circumstances that they live in.”
The Fischers are also trying to deliver that message to young children.
O "esperanza” truck—inviting enough given its previous life as an ice cream truck—has doors that spring open to reveal a stage. Every Sunday, sobre 25 volunteers and staff from the Calidonia Outreach Center visit vulnerable communities, hand out snacksand put on puppet and clown shows that instill positive values in young children.
“It’s important to teach those kids even though they live in difficult neighborhoods, to start thinking positive about themselves, about their abilities, their talents and their future,” says Pastor Fischer.
In the first four months, mais do que 3,500 kids came to watch the shows.
“It’s growing everywhere we go,” says Pastor Fischer. “They wait for us. They know us. Every time I go somewhere: 'Ei, where’s the truck? Where are the clowns?’”
On this day the clowns—who are known, when plain-faced and wigless, as Leopolido Kennion and his wife Anayansi– are back at the Outreach Center working on next Sunday’s script, and practicing with the other puppet volunteers.
There’s a perfectly-pitched mouse, a loud winking pig and several big-mouthed people-puppets who nod along with the kid-friendly dialogue.
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Thousands of dedicated delegates this week called for a scaled-up HIV response to save lives at the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Austrália. The five-day conference, themed “Stepping Up the Pace,” attracted 12,000 delegados, who discussed and debated the latest HIV research and programmatic developments, working to rapidly roll out new interventions to achieve an AIDS-free generation.
Em an article I co-authored in a special supplement to the Journal of AIDS, which was released at the Conference, I call for better strategies to help HIV-positive moms succeed in their efforts to protect their infants and live healthy lives with HIV.
The article urges health and development practitioners to take a more nuanced and patient-sensitive approach to treating and supporting HIV-positive pregnant women, instead of relying on more traditional clinical and medical models.
Por exemplo, using community health workers or peers as liaisons between people living with HIV and health care providers, and making care less disjointed by incorporating social services, child protection and education into packages of client-responsive services.
The improved approach would attract more mothers to seek out and stay in care, and adhere to treatment, improving their own lives and saving those of their children by preventing HIV transmission.
The Melbourne conference’s call for decreased HIV stigma and discrimination is also well in line with recent initiatives at Creative.
A newly-completed research study in Uganda, Ethiopia and Mozambique conducted by Susan Rogers, a Senior Associate in Design, Monitoring and Evaluation, examined how gender and internal stigma around one’s own perception of their HIV status affected disclosure. This is critical research, as studies demonstrate that the more individuals disclose their HIV status to their partners, the more likely they are to seek treatment.
Susan also conducted research in Jamaica and the Bahamas with healthcare and social service providers. She found that key affected populations in their care were experiencing “layered stigma”—HIV–related stigma combined with stigma toward marginalized groups. Findings from Susan’s study were published last month in the journal AIDS Care.
The message in these articles resonates with Creative’s longstanding work on HIV prevention. Desde 1996, Creative has managed more than 20 projects related to HIV or Orphans and Vulnerable Children, and now manages more than $18 million in President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) funding in Africa.
By harnessing education to prevent HIV and link children to health services and policy reform, our programs in Uganda, Zâmbia, Nigeria and elsewhere have addressed critical structural factors contributing to young girls’ vulnerability to HIV through school drop-out prevention programs and psychosocial support for vulnerable children.
Throughout these programs, Creative is taking the integrated approach that I argued for in my article, and about whose benefits health and development experts are increasingly vocal.
Sara Melillo is Creative’s Management Associate for Health
It happened the first time in Honduras, where my organization had sent me to document programmatic success. We had rushed around all day, flinging wires and lights around, lugging our cameras and backpacks from interview to interview, scribbling notes and shaking hands. When we collapsed for lunch at 3:30 we were exhausted. And there it was. Right across the street. With all of its 31 flavors. A Baskin Robbins. The kind of American chain I had promised myself I would never, ever patronize on a trip to another country.
A few months later, I was in Panama. And so was a Subway. I don’t know how to say “sandwich artist” in Spanish but I listened to the man in front of me say “con todo” as he gestured toward the row of excruciatingly familiar washed-out tomato slices and leaking pickles. So I said it too, and walked away with the sinking, guilty sensation that I was having the same groaning sandwich I might have had on any Wednesday in my hometown.
What was I becoming? I had gone to so many countries where I railed against being a tourist, and sought instead to be a traveler. Where I insisted on experiencing the culture, the food and the people even at some cost to my ego, wallet and digestive tract.
And yet here I was after lunch, in a taxi in a country I might never return to, listening to the driver tell me the Panama Canal was five minutes away and hearing myself respond, “Just keep going, we don’t have time for that.”
As a communications writer for an international development organization, I love that my job lets me occasionally travel the world. And yet it’s not the kind of traveling I love.
Instead of following a gap-toothed stranger through the curling stone streets of Lamu, Kenya to find the house of the man who sells heart-shaped labania, I check my watch from the backseat of a seatbeltless sedan and calculate the minutes until we are officially late to a meeting.
Instead of playing a game of pick-up soccer with barefoot neighborhood kids, I’m silently urging the photographer to hurry up and capture their carefree smiles for the cover of our next case study.
As I rush around checking items off my to-do list, I rarely get the chance to cross things off my bucket list.
But maybe I’ve been writing down the wrong things. Sure, on that trip to Honduras, I never got to snorkel in Roatán or see the Mayan ruins near Copán. But I laughed with my local film crew over a bean-and-mayonnaise sandwich I didn’t quite mean to order, and felt inspired as I followed a grandmother around the barrio she was trying to save from gang violence.
I never got the chance to buy any of the famous metalwork when I went on a work trip to Haiti. But a local woman taught me all the gestures to a lilting folk song as we motored a small fishing boat into the Atlantic, and my mouth filled with decadent sweetness as I squished a fresh chunk of honeycomb that a young beekeeper slid to me atop his machete.
I never did visit the Panama Canal. I guess I’ll have to go back.
And when I do, these frantic trips spent focused on work will allow me to bring a deeper understanding than I would have gained from trying to find the most authentic experience on my own.
I’ll know that just around the corner a bunch of kids whose parents are in opposing gangs are playing a ping pong tournament together, and learning about nutrition from a volunteer husband-and-wife duo who dress up as clowns.
I’ll know that there’s an old woman in knee socks who comes to feed the pigeons out of a floppy woven basket in the square in front of the Iglesia de los Delores, and that a group of retired soccer referees meet on the Parque Central benches every Thursday morning to gab.
And I’ll know that when I get sick of bean and mayonnaise sandwiches, or whatever other local delicacy I’ve ruthlessly hunted down, and when doing my job has left me haggard and overheated, there will probably be a Baskin Robbins just around the corner.
Por Jennifer Brookland
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The Crime & Violence Prevention Project was launched on Tuesday, April 23rd in Nejapa, El Salvador with special guests: Sergio Vladimir Quijada, Mayor of Nejapa; David Munguia Payes, Minister of Justice & Segurança; Mari Carmen Aponte, US Ambassador to El Salvador; Kirk Dahlgreen, USAID Mission Director and Harold Sibaja, Diretor de Projetos.
This project will build on USAID and Creative’s previous prevention programs in Central America with the aim of increasing citizen safety in El Salvador. Creative will work to support the Government of El Salvador’s national level prevention efforts, as well as the expansion of municipal-led crime and violence prevention programming.
We look forward to working with USAID El Salvador, our partners: Institute for Research and Development for Violence Prevention and Social Coexistence (CISALVA) , o Foundation for the Support of Municipalities of El Salvador (FUNDAMUNI) and a number of local stakeholders toward reducing the incidence of crime and violence in El Salvador. More important we look forward to working with Salvadorean youth so they can live in a better place and achieve their dreams!
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Por uma noite em Honduras, voluntários do bairro foram reconhecidos como heróis da comunidade em um evento que defendeu aqueles que retribuem em alguns dos ambientes mais desafiadores.
Três dos sete premiados por seus serviços pelos EUA. A Embaixadora Lisa Kubiske participa do Creative Associates International's Aliança Juvenil de Honduras programa, que é apoiado pelos EUA. Agência para o Desenvolvimento Internacional.
Aliança Juvenil de Honduras usa subsídios e assistência técnica para permitir que o governo, sector privado e comunidades afectadas para enfrentar a violência. Em Honduras, estabeleceu 44 Centros de extensão juvenil onde as crianças encontram apoio, mentoria e oportunidades para retribuir.
Em junho 5 cerimônia de premiação, Edwin Maradiaga foi premiado por seu trabalho voluntário ensinando às crianças conhecimentos básicos de informática em um desses centros em Choloma, uma comunidade localizada perto da cidade de San Pedro Sula.
“Eu sei algumas coisas sobre tecnologia da informação,— ele disse em outro vídeo sobre seu trabalho voluntário. “Vou ensinar o pouco que sei para as crianças para que elas aprendam um pouco mais…”
No 20 anos, Maradiaga ganhou o prêmio de herói da categoria juvenil, que foi aberto a voluntários com idades 14 para 24 que demonstrou mentoria excepcional, habilidades motivacionais e/ou talento artístico em apoio a atividades de segurança e desenvolvimento regional.
Corvo Guerreiro, uma trupe de dança de San Pedro Sula e Chamelecon, se apresentou no evento após ganhar o prêmio do Grupo, dado a um coletivo que demonstrou compromisso com a juventude, comunidades ou um fator de risco específico através de serviços, defesa de direitos ou talento artístico.
Twelve year old Graciela lives with her two younger sisters and great-grandmother in the rough Honduran community of Zapote Norte. Graciela’s father was a taxi driver who was murdered. Graciela’s mother, a victim of violence, left the family and cannot be found. Graciela’s grandmother moved to the United States and sends money to the family.
The pre-teen is eager to be reunited with her grandmother.
This true story is typical of what Vice President Biden will hear when he meets Friday with leaders of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to discuss the acute humanitarian crisis of unaccompanied minors entering the United States—of which nearly 60,000 have been apprehended this year, 10 times more than in 2011.
The vast majority of these minors, some as young as 4 anos, are making this life-threatening trip through a network of smugglers and without other family members.
It is a growing crisis and a transnational problem on which leaders must collaborate for a comprehensive and compassionate strategy.
While news coverage and the public debate have focused primarily on the children’s perilous journey and the effects of overcrowding in US border detention centers, little attention has been paid to the so-called “push” factors that are causing them to travel north.
Os EUA. Agency for International Development recently funded a series of focus groups in Honduras and El Salvador with youth who were at-risk of migration—such as Graciela—to determine some of the “push” and “pull” factors that are causing minors to risk migrating to the United States. While they validated what we know through our work with local governments and youth, it revealed a number of surprises.
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junho. 12, 2014 – Microsoft Corp.. e a Creative Associates International estão formando uma parceria para fornecer a milhares de jovens em situação de risco em El Salvador acesso a treinamento em software e tecnologia como uma alternativa à atração de gangues.
“O envolvimento da Microsoft terá um impacto significativo, efeito positivo sobre os jovens em áreas infestadas de gangues de El Salvador,” diz Charito Kruvant, Presidente e CEO da Creative. “Agradecemos o apoio da empresa ao nosso trabalho de prevenção ao crime e ao papel que os jovens desempenham na criação de um ambiente mais seguro., futuro melhor para suas comunidades.”
Usando a rede de criativos da Creative 77 Centros de extensão juvenil em El Salvador, Microsoft vai equipar 800 computadores com aplicativos de software educacional, incluindo escritório 365, Matemática da Microsoft 4.0, Telescópio Mundial da Microsoft e muito mais, que beneficiará aproximadamente 25,000 juventude. Com suporte de fornecedores locais, Microsoft vai treinar 130 coordenadores de tecnologia da informação para usar a plataforma.
O suporte da Microsoft equivale a $2.94 milhão.
A empresa também apoiará 13 Academias de TI salvadorenhas com formação para coordenadores de TI, um currículo completo de tecnologia de ensino e ferramentas de aprendizagem que ajudam os jovens a desenvolver habilidades comercializáveis.
Programa de Prevenção à Violência e Crime da Creative em El Salvador - que é financiado pelos EUA. Agência para o Desenvolvimento Internacional – está a abordar os níveis preocupantes de violência do país, melhorando a capacidade das comunidades, municípios e instituições nacionais para combater o crime violento.
Os centros comunitários da Creative oferecem aos jovens em situação de risco um espaço seguro onde podem receber aulas acadêmicas, melhorar seu conhecimento de informática, aprenda inglês e encontre oportunidades de recreação.
Em toda a América Central, A Creative estabeleceu mais de 115 Centros de Extensão Juvenil, com mais planejamento em comunidades vulneráveis.
NÓS. Embaixador em El Salvador, Mari Carmen Aponte, elogiou o acordo entre Creative e Microsoft.
“Estou extremamente satisfeito por formalizar este acordo com um importante parceiro do setor privado," NÓS. O Embaixador Aponte disse durante a cerimónia de assinatura do Memorando de Entendimento. “Precisamente, no âmbito da Parceria para o Crescimento, encorajamos todos os setores a se unirem em ações de prevenção da violência para aumentar a segurança e a prosperidade de milhares de cidadãos salvadorenhos.”
A Microsoft apoiará o projeto através de sua iniciativa YouthSpark, um programa global de cidadania corporativa que capacita os jovens a imaginar e desenvolver o seu potencial e os conecta a novas oportunidades na educação, emprego e empreendedorismo. (http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship/en-us/youthspark/)
Grace Rosa, Gerente Geral da Microsoft El Salvador, assinou o memorando de entendimento para sua empresa.
“É importante criar espaços de cooperação mútua com vários tipos de instituições, que buscam a partir de seu contexto e instituições maximizar o desenvolvimento de El Salvador,”Rosi disse. "Por isso, reconhecemos que devemos unir-nos aos esforços institucionais promovidos pela USAID, e em particular, devemos apoiar aquelas iniciativas que buscam proporcionar oportunidades reais para a juventude salvadorenha alcançar seus objetivos, seu desenvolvimento, formação profissional e competências em tecnologia da informação.”
Sobre Creative Associates Internacional
A Creative Associates International trabalha com comunidades carentes, compartilhando conhecimento e experiência em educação, crescimento económico, governação e transições do conflito para a paz. Creative é a segunda maior empresa pertencente a mulheres que trabalha com os EUA. governo.
Com sede em Washington, DC, A Creative atualmente possui projetos em mais de 15 países. Desde 1977, funcionou em 85 países e em quase todos os continentes. Reconhecido por sua capacidade de trabalhar rapidamente, de forma flexível e eficaz em ambientes conflituosos, A Creative está comprometida em gerar soluções sustentáveis de longo prazo para problemas complexos de desenvolvimento.
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Hoje, milhões de fãs de todos os cantos do mundo desfrutarão de uma das ocasiões mais esperadas para levar as massas ao frenesi a cada quatro anos.
As ruas do Brasil ficarão cobertas de amarelo e verde, batucadas e berimbaus estará jogando, corações vão bater mais rápido, rostos serão pintados, bandeiras e cartazes tremularão e as cores nacionais serão orgulhosamente usadas.
O som de um apito enviará 22 homens em um campo correndo e lutando para enviar uma bola para um 7.32 metros de largura por 2.44 metros de rede de altura. A cidade mais moderna e cosmopolita do Brasil, São Paulo, sediará a tão esperada Copa do Mundo da FIFA, com a primeira partida – entre o time da casa Brasil e Croácia – na quinta-feira, Junho 12.
Futebol (futebol), “o belo jogo,” é considerado o esporte mais popular globalmente. O jogo aborda questões de nacionalismo e identidade; uma experiência humana comum compartilhada por espectadores de muitas culturas.
Parece que ser feliz está em voga na mídia internacional atualmente. Do repressão à juventude iraniana fazendo um vídeo de “Happy” de Pharrell Williams para vários índices que classificam o nível de felicidade das pessoas que vivem nos países ao redor do mundo, o debate sobre a felicidade está em andamento.
Surpreendentemente (ou não) os índices recentes apresentam conjuntos de classificações um tanto diferentes. Para minha alegria, a última enquete de Gallup, feito com 1,500 pessoas de cada um 138 países, colocar quatro dos lugares onde morei ou trabalhei entre os melhores 10 lugares mais felizes do mundo (Panamá, O salvador, Honduras e Guatemala).
A estranha justaposição é que estes são também quatro países que fizeram parte da programação conjunta da Creative com a USAID que trabalha para reduzir os elevados níveis de violência..
Como isso funciona – quando as pessoas entrevistadas de vários níveis de renda expressaram altos níveis de “prazer,” “rir ou sorrir muito” e sentir-se “bem descansado,” enquanto também morava em três dos países (O salvador, Honduras e Guatemala) com o mais alto taxas de homicídio globalmente?
Fiquei surpreso com respostas tão positivas dos salvadorenhos, Guatemaltecos e hondurenhos às pesquisas de felicidade devido ao alto nível de violência de gangues e extorsão por parte de gangues. Notavelmente, a violência provavelmente contribuiu para o fato de que pessoas menos felizes de acordo com a pesquisa deste ano, compreensivelmente assim, são sírios, Chadianos e Iemenitas.