SERENDIPITY KIDS, Street Children reising throughout Latin America, education cancels poverty, love > despare, opportunity > boredom, drugs & crime. VOLUNTEER or GIUVE

Children of Porvenir who entered 02.2005
[Note: This is one group, so far there have been 162 such groups.]
For several this was the first photo ever taken of them. No electricity or water: sunlight and water buckets .

Moms agreed to let their children study instead of work, Abandoned kids turned up on their own. We borrowed a vacant house..

We brought in furniture, highered a teacher, bussed in volunteer assistants and social workers..

.	We provided lunch, some clothes, counselling and some medical services. With progress came books and book bags

These are the children accepted into public school.

And this is the day we registered them. Those who did not qualify yet would stay another term with us. We will go on teaching kids who don.t get in for up to 2 years.

This day we gave them their first school uniforms

This is when we begin to negotiate with whatever family the children have, start getting them to be responsible. Two years later they'll be buying the

childrens uniforms.

We had to place half the children in one school, half in another; because nobody had these children in their records as likely to be attending school - so there was not room for all of them in the nearby state school.

Our founderes have searched for workable and affordable solutions to the large number of poor children who fail to receive that essential key to a better life: Education. Starting with the Educational Communication Association in the mid 1960s to founding SOS International in the mid 1970s to the many experamental and pilot projects undertaken throughout the 1990s and early part of the 21st century. All culminating with the creation of our current SUCCESSFUL method of recruiting, motivating, preparing and getting educated the poorest element of LAtin American society.In the past three years we have gotten more than two thousand out-of-school children into into formal educational educational instutions. We have gotten them off the street, inbto one of our shanty schools; and when they have cought up with children who have been going to school all along: we regisdtrer them and sponsor them in a State or private school. After we have registered them in formal institutions, paid for their uniforms, school materials, events fees and transport (if appropriate), for the next two years we will stay in close contact with the children we are sponsoring: we make certain they carry on with their education. So far over 80% are still in school when the two years ends.

There is a great need for this programme, or one like it which succeeds in tackling the great problem of the poorest children missing the opportunity of education. In 2006 we began to shift our emphasis to demonstrating this simple programme to Governments and larger NGOs in the hope they will take onboard this proven method of helpingf poor children get educated

In Peru, for example, 26% of school age children are not in school. [We can prove it] We and our volunteers have found a way to recruit these children, educate them to make up for all the years they have missed. Prepare them to pass the entrance examinations for the grades they belong in. We help pay their registration fees, uniforms, class materials. Then we support them in school for two years: until they are well launched as young people becoming educated. It works.

Here is an account of just one group of children, recruited in a slum in early 2005. This is a pictorial account of their pàssagfe through our programme, into national school, and beyond.

<< This foto story starts at the upper left.

Club Meetings
Every month or six weeks for the next two years, with cooperation from the schools, our staff and volunteers have been visiting the children in their schools, Bruce Peru Club meetings. With the school's cooperation we bring the children together for a meeting, game playing, refreshments (sometimes a clown or musician accompanies our staff and volunteers).

Here is the second Club meeting, August 2005. Social worker on left, Gavin Moloy in the centre, singer/songwriter on the right.

The social worker checks on the childrens progress at school and life at home. It reinforces children who have no family support or live in abusive homes.

Below are photos from our last Club meeting
with these dear children, held 23 May 2007.