ID :
208432
Wed, 09/21/2011 - 06:44
Auther :
Shortlink :
https://oananews.org//node/208432
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Unfazed by violence, Korean shelter reaches out to children in Guatemala
(Yonhap Feature)
By Kim Hyun
Contributing writer
SAN JOSE PINULA, Guatemala, Sept. 20 (Yonhap) -- Children giggle and scramble about playing games as puppies run alongside, a common suburban scene, except that here, they are being sheltered by Koreans from poverty and violence of mafia and crime-ridden neighborhoods.
The Home of Angel is just a few minutes' drive from the center of San Jose Pinula, a bleak suburb of Guatemala City. Colored yellow and brown, the house, cradled in lush woods and corn fields, mocks the town that's used to bloody crimes, the latest tragedy involving murders of two mayoral candidates by their competitors in June.
The 200 or so Guatemalan children at the facility are from families who cannot afford their education or are under court protection from domestic and street abuses.
"We wish to be a community that's different from the outside world, where the children can dream," said Fr. Hong Sung-uy, administrator-general of the Home of Angel.
Locals were skeptical and hardly touched when the Home of Angel opened in a rented house in Guatemala City in 2005, but its low-profile activity gradually earned the trust of parents and the local authorities. A court in Jutiapa, a notorious mafia district in southern Guatemala, and the Guatemala City government started to entrust children to the shelter; it even received donations from locals, a rare case in the poor Central American country.
A year after reopening in the new-built 39,600-square-meter house in the capital's suburb, the Home of Angel is now in final consultations with Guatemala's Education Ministry for the integration of its primary school, School Mirine (meaning "galaxy" in Korean), with the town's government-run school, an antiquated two-classroom house expected to move in next year.
"The biggest goal we try to achieve is to go into the culture and work with it," said Hong, who belongs to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cheongju in South Korea. "We are not here to teach, we are here to live together. That's the point where we always make mistakes and try to do better."
The presence of Koreans in Guatemala may resonate little with most of Guatemalans, but the bilateral relationship has been thriving in terms of industry in recent decades. South Korea is the fourth largest foreign investor in Guatemala, following the United States, Mexico and Spain. Koreans here operate 80 percent of Guatemala's clothing and textile industry, the nation's biggest source of dollar income along with its traditional products of coffee and sugar.
Since the mid-1980s, facing rising labor costs and the advent of technology-based industries at home, Korean textile businessmen have made inroads into Guatemala, capitalizing on the Mayans' deft handcraft skills, cheap labor and the nation's geographical proximity with the U.S. market.
Their industrial growth gave birth to a humanitarian interest. Following the donation of land by two benefactors in Guatemala -- one Korean, another French -- Korean emigrants in Guatemala funded the US$1 million construction of the Home of Angel along with their fellowmen in the U.S. and the South Korean government. The Koreans still fund the shelter's operation.
At its inception, the Home of Angel was a small, nameless shelter. Hong lived with about a dozen local children in his own rented house, paying the bills with his monthly paycheck from his diocese in Cheongju. The house owners complained and they had to move frequently.
Now with a brand new modern house that can accommodate 150 children in its dormitory and up to 400 children for school, Hong is in no hurry to fill the empty rooms. Most of the children sent from the court and the city are victims of physical and sexual abuse and need time to heal, he said. The oldest are aged 15, and the youngest 40 days old, found abandoned in front of a village office. Each dorm equipped with a bathroom, a washing machine, a study room and lockers houses about a dozen children with a nanny.
Like the rest of the country, the shelter had its share of rampant violence. One local staffer in charge of handling construction workers was shot to death on his way from bank. One of the two victims of the election murder scheme in June had provided treatment to the children as head of the municipal health center. Still reeling from a decades-long civil war and burdened with extreme economic inequality and the migration of mafia gangs from Mexico, Guatemala's security situation could turn more uncertain in the ongoing presidential election season that continues until November.
"When I meet someone, I find myself somewhat hesitant to give a hug. I first think, 'Does he have a gun?'" Hong said, recalling a recent murder of a sixth-grade boy at the town's primary school, whose death was found related to a mafia operation.
"This distrust and anxiety people here have toward another human being breaks relationships. In broken relationships, a father sexually exploits his daughter, and children are sold for money. The pain of society seeps down to children."
After a half-day school, the children spend the rest of the day doing homework and various extracurricular activities, with special outings planned for weekends. Their daily routine is full of back-to-back scheduled activities, but the administrators know the rigid schedule and the good facilities can't be the best remedy.
"Many of them have been exposed to sexual, physical and mental violence at home, and the six-year-olds will have to work at coffee farms when they go back home during the vacation, but they still need family," said Emma Romillo, director of the Home of Angel who doubles as a psychotherapist for the children.
"At the bottom of all those problems is extreme poverty," she said. "I believe this place will be a watershed for the children. Here they will see there's a chance at a different life and that they can make a choice."
Olga de la Cruz, 17, one of the Home's first students who was recently accepted to study law at Mariano Galvez University in Guatemala City, believes her education will open new opportunities for her to lead a better life and give back to society.
"I need to help my family and I want to be a better person," she said, now working part-time at the shelter. "My desire to succeed is strong and is what motivates me to keep going."
Daily stories of murder and armed robbery in Guatemala often scare away foreign tourists and residents, but the danger and extreme poverty behind it are just the reasons for Hong and other volunteer workers to stay.
"This is where we met them and came to stay," Hong said. "The world won't change with us, but our hope is that this little corner of the world will become a better, brighter place with us."
anynew-s@hanmail.net
(END)
By Kim Hyun
Contributing writer
SAN JOSE PINULA, Guatemala, Sept. 20 (Yonhap) -- Children giggle and scramble about playing games as puppies run alongside, a common suburban scene, except that here, they are being sheltered by Koreans from poverty and violence of mafia and crime-ridden neighborhoods.
The Home of Angel is just a few minutes' drive from the center of San Jose Pinula, a bleak suburb of Guatemala City. Colored yellow and brown, the house, cradled in lush woods and corn fields, mocks the town that's used to bloody crimes, the latest tragedy involving murders of two mayoral candidates by their competitors in June.
The 200 or so Guatemalan children at the facility are from families who cannot afford their education or are under court protection from domestic and street abuses.
"We wish to be a community that's different from the outside world, where the children can dream," said Fr. Hong Sung-uy, administrator-general of the Home of Angel.
Locals were skeptical and hardly touched when the Home of Angel opened in a rented house in Guatemala City in 2005, but its low-profile activity gradually earned the trust of parents and the local authorities. A court in Jutiapa, a notorious mafia district in southern Guatemala, and the Guatemala City government started to entrust children to the shelter; it even received donations from locals, a rare case in the poor Central American country.
A year after reopening in the new-built 39,600-square-meter house in the capital's suburb, the Home of Angel is now in final consultations with Guatemala's Education Ministry for the integration of its primary school, School Mirine (meaning "galaxy" in Korean), with the town's government-run school, an antiquated two-classroom house expected to move in next year.
"The biggest goal we try to achieve is to go into the culture and work with it," said Hong, who belongs to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cheongju in South Korea. "We are not here to teach, we are here to live together. That's the point where we always make mistakes and try to do better."
The presence of Koreans in Guatemala may resonate little with most of Guatemalans, but the bilateral relationship has been thriving in terms of industry in recent decades. South Korea is the fourth largest foreign investor in Guatemala, following the United States, Mexico and Spain. Koreans here operate 80 percent of Guatemala's clothing and textile industry, the nation's biggest source of dollar income along with its traditional products of coffee and sugar.
Since the mid-1980s, facing rising labor costs and the advent of technology-based industries at home, Korean textile businessmen have made inroads into Guatemala, capitalizing on the Mayans' deft handcraft skills, cheap labor and the nation's geographical proximity with the U.S. market.
Their industrial growth gave birth to a humanitarian interest. Following the donation of land by two benefactors in Guatemala -- one Korean, another French -- Korean emigrants in Guatemala funded the US$1 million construction of the Home of Angel along with their fellowmen in the U.S. and the South Korean government. The Koreans still fund the shelter's operation.
At its inception, the Home of Angel was a small, nameless shelter. Hong lived with about a dozen local children in his own rented house, paying the bills with his monthly paycheck from his diocese in Cheongju. The house owners complained and they had to move frequently.
Now with a brand new modern house that can accommodate 150 children in its dormitory and up to 400 children for school, Hong is in no hurry to fill the empty rooms. Most of the children sent from the court and the city are victims of physical and sexual abuse and need time to heal, he said. The oldest are aged 15, and the youngest 40 days old, found abandoned in front of a village office. Each dorm equipped with a bathroom, a washing machine, a study room and lockers houses about a dozen children with a nanny.
Like the rest of the country, the shelter had its share of rampant violence. One local staffer in charge of handling construction workers was shot to death on his way from bank. One of the two victims of the election murder scheme in June had provided treatment to the children as head of the municipal health center. Still reeling from a decades-long civil war and burdened with extreme economic inequality and the migration of mafia gangs from Mexico, Guatemala's security situation could turn more uncertain in the ongoing presidential election season that continues until November.
"When I meet someone, I find myself somewhat hesitant to give a hug. I first think, 'Does he have a gun?'" Hong said, recalling a recent murder of a sixth-grade boy at the town's primary school, whose death was found related to a mafia operation.
"This distrust and anxiety people here have toward another human being breaks relationships. In broken relationships, a father sexually exploits his daughter, and children are sold for money. The pain of society seeps down to children."
After a half-day school, the children spend the rest of the day doing homework and various extracurricular activities, with special outings planned for weekends. Their daily routine is full of back-to-back scheduled activities, but the administrators know the rigid schedule and the good facilities can't be the best remedy.
"Many of them have been exposed to sexual, physical and mental violence at home, and the six-year-olds will have to work at coffee farms when they go back home during the vacation, but they still need family," said Emma Romillo, director of the Home of Angel who doubles as a psychotherapist for the children.
"At the bottom of all those problems is extreme poverty," she said. "I believe this place will be a watershed for the children. Here they will see there's a chance at a different life and that they can make a choice."
Olga de la Cruz, 17, one of the Home's first students who was recently accepted to study law at Mariano Galvez University in Guatemala City, believes her education will open new opportunities for her to lead a better life and give back to society.
"I need to help my family and I want to be a better person," she said, now working part-time at the shelter. "My desire to succeed is strong and is what motivates me to keep going."
Daily stories of murder and armed robbery in Guatemala often scare away foreign tourists and residents, but the danger and extreme poverty behind it are just the reasons for Hong and other volunteer workers to stay.
"This is where we met them and came to stay," Hong said. "The world won't change with us, but our hope is that this little corner of the world will become a better, brighter place with us."
anynew-s@hanmail.net
(END)
