Fr Juan Linares, director of the project spoke in the Hall about the history, the methods used and the results achieved by the Salesians and their lay co-workers. He illustrated his talk with a video produced by Don Bosco Missions – Media Centre in Turin.
The main character in the video is Jeffrey, one of the many youngsters in Santo Domingo which, very probably, is the city with the highest concentration of children working on the streets., Every morning Jeffrey who like many others began working on the streets to help his family leaves the shanty town to heads for the city centre with his wooden box, brushes and shoe-shine equipment. All day long he polishes the shoes of passers-by for a few pesos.
One day Jeffrey was approached by Martin, a teacher, who invited the youngster to go to the Salesian centre. The meeting changed Jeffrey’s life.
Poverty is the first reason for the phenomenon of child-labour, youngsters engaged more or less as street workers, selling things or shining shoes. These youngsters are exposed to all kinds of dangers: petty-criminality, prostitution, abuse and violence. The situation is particularly acute for the “palomos”, children who are working and living on the streets because they have either run away or been thrown out of their families. The danger of becoming totally excluded from society is very great, and there are many of them who have no access to even the most elementary form of schooling.
The “Muchachos y Mochachas” with Don Bosco Project is fundamentally that of the oratory with a net-work spread across the whole Dominican Republic through 12 Centres for poor children and youngsters, at risk of being exploited if not rescued from the streets.
It is a Salesian network for the protection and all-round human development of more than 4000 children and youngsters with their families. The work is organised according to different areas of coordinated activity: the educational, working, social family, recreational and legal. This last area in particular is involved in dealing with cases of the violation of human rights (failure to be officially registered, exploitation abuse, violence), but it also has the task of developing a process which is educational and formative, promotional and pastoral based on human rights and preventing their being violated.
This process of basic simple education to human rights is aimed at the parents and the families, the teachers and social workers as well as the youngsters themselves. And so simple education in and for human rights becomes one means for the spreading of a basic preventive culture of respect for and promotion of fundamental rights.
The video is available on the platform www.donbosco-humanrights.org
Published 09/01/2009
