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Ready to go to study and start a new day
Like every other day, Francis Torres is in a hurry
She has a few minutes to get out of her home
"Where are we going? We are going to see the teacher!"
At scarcely 24 years-old, she is raising her two daughters, Laura and Sarita, alone.
The three of them live on a house with a roof made of tin
where the chill seeps in and where running water and electricity are a privilege.
As many of the mothers who live in this part of the city, she makes her living
cleaning houses and washing clothes to earn an income that sometimes
doesn't exceed five dollars per day.
"Run quickly"
Francis walks almost twenty blocks daily, through the streets of one
of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods of Bogota
"Teacher, good morning, sorry I we're late!"
The "Our Hope" kindergarten is very good, as a working mother it has helped me a lot.
It allows me to out and work and feed my children in the evening
because the food they serve at the kindergarten is excellent.
The "Our Hope" community home was founded 30 years ago by a group of women
who took it upon themselves to care and feed
the children of women, like Francis, that have to work to sustain their families.
Most of the women who use the day-care center are alone or seperated
and they are the sole breadwinners for their families.
so this project, this kindergarten, has benefited a lot of people.
Women, boys and girls that today have changed their way of thinking and living.
Myriam was the one who headed the foundation
of this first community home, 30 years ago.
The situation for children was very difficult, they would often have domestic accidents
They were home alone most of the day and locked up.
For many children, this home has meant the difference between life and death
They are well cared for there, while here at home they could be exposed to many
dangers, maybe a gunfight, a fire, and many things that could happen in a home
So the fact that they are well taken care of calms me down a lot.
During the first days of the community home, the mothers financed the project
with their scarce resources. The successful experience and the lack of official
policies to protect children, five years later forced the state to allocate
resources in order to replicate the idea througout the country
The project of community homes of welfares emerged when the State realized
that the people in the poor communities had a way to solve the problem of the
care of the children, that was autochthonous, that was conceived by them alone
and that was these "care-giver mothers".
Today these resources amount to almost 400 million dollars, which finance 78,700
community homes all around the country. The project generates nearly 80 thousand
direct jobs and benefits at least 1.2 million children under five years
who receive care and food.
Francis accepts that, in her case, the community home has been the only
alternative that her daughters have had to be free from hunger and malnutrition
My work consists of cleaning houses, doing the housekeeping
so it's not much you get paid for that and there's not a lot you can do with that
to be able to give my daughters the best.
The government invests around 15 dollars per month for each child included in the program
Too small an amount in the opinion of experts in social development
The government had to start thinking how to take care of children.
Instead of thinking of a professionaly structured system, it looked for a cheap solution
and the cheap solution was, "look, seeing as the women in a desperate effort
to go to work, are leaving their children with the neighbor, lets create a program
that take advantage of that" and it's called welfare community homes.
"We play in the forest while the wolf is not here"
Today, the reality has exceeded the expectations of a project that started out being
neighborly help and now is a model of childhood protection that includes
preschool education and which has benefited three generations
of children from poor families in Colombia.