SALVADORAN
YOUTH
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Over the past four years, more than a quarter of a million
unaccompanied minors have made the dangerous journey north on foot,
hitchhiking, even riding on freight train cars, trying to cross the U.S.
Border. Remarkably, 40 percent of them come from one tiny country, El Salvador.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: El Salvador is a daunting place to grow up. There are few job
opportunities for young people and the specter of gang violence is everywhere,
in graffiti that dominates the walls and in the graphic headlines that dominate
the front pages.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: El Salvador now has the one of the world’s highest homicide rates,
as rival gangs fight for territory and clash with the police. There’s even a
special section of this cemetery just outside San Salvador where young gang
members are buried. Adorned with the hallmark graffiti, the headstones show
that most of the dead are teenagers. Young people we spoke with confirmed that
fear and violence dominate their neighborhoods.
SANDRA: It’s difficult because there are a lot of temptations in my
neighborhood. But with education you can keep your mind busy so you don’t end
up on the street.
FERNANDO: It’s the same for me. I see the soldiers and police going after
the gangs. You cannot go hang out in the park. So I go home and stay at home in
order to be safe.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: These teens are luckier than most. They’re part of a new
public-private partnership that’s aimed at giving young people a way out of the
violence and into a lifelong career. It’s called YouthBuild
and it’s based on a U.S. Program that was started in Harlem 30 years ago. In El
Salvador, the program, funded with a mix of U.S. Government aid and private
philanthropy is managed by Catholic Relief Services. And provides vocational
skills, leadership training and academic coaching for youth ages 15 to 25.
RICK JONES: It’s critical to create a safe space for young people. Especially
when they’re coming from environments in the street where they experience
violence. My own family, my nephew, by the time he was in 9th grade, had seen 3
kids assassinated on his way to school.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: YouthBuild’s Rick Jones has lived in El Salvador for 27 years and has
witnessed a transformation of this country. The brutal civil war of the 1980s
destroyed the country’s economy and claimed about 75-thousand lives. Many young
Salvadorans fled to Los Angeles where they formed gangs. Many were then
deported, bringing back their U.S. gang affiliation and expanding locally
RICK JONES: They came into El Salvador into a situation where most young men
were unemployed and out of school. They organized like wildfire on the prairie.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: YouthBuild goes into some of the most troubled areas of El Salvador’s capital
to recruit students.
RICK JONES: In our programs, we ask young people “how many people know
somebody who has been affected directly by the violence or has been killed?”
Half the kids in the room will raise their hand. They know what violence looks
like. They don’t know what the alternatives look like.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: YouthBuild tries to show them those alternatives through programs that teach
marketable skills, such as baking and cooking, car mechanics, computer
technology, cosmetology, or building a small business.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: There’s also a focus on empathy, on collaboration, conflict
resolution and self-confidence. Each day begins at 8 A.M. with a prayer and a
check-in about what’s going on in their lives and then it’s onto team building
activities. Director Sara Mena Ramos says the goal is to give the young people
new tools to deal with the dysfunction they see all around them.
SARA MENA RAMOS: We work a lot on life and job skills. Areas such as self esteem. Dealing with the emotional psycho-social parts
of their lives. And job skills to learn how to interact with employers.
RICK JONES: Most kids come into the program because they can get a job at the
end of it. But while they’re in the program, they also take leadership in building
community assets, like refurbishing playgrounds, community centers. Taking
responsibility for their own lives, the lives of their family, and their
community.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Jefferson Guevara graduated a year ago and is now employed
full-time at a bakery. Amid pervasive violence, his employer didn’t want the
attention a foreign TV camera could attract, so we can’t show him on the job.
But he came back to his old classroom to show-off his skills to current
students.
JEFFERSON GUEVARA: I like the job. I’m still learning a lot. You have to be faster,
dealing with all of the clients. But this program gave me the skills to handle
the job.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: YouthBuild El Salvador began in 2009 with 110 students at two sites
gradually adding 4 more locations. Two years ago the Salvadoran Government
decided to adopt the program, funding an expansion to 30 sites serving nearly
4000 students this year. Carlos Gomez directs that effort.
CARLOS GOMEZ: Businesses in our country are demanding youth with different
attitudes, with principles and values that for some reason they didn’t develop
at home. A young person who is responsible, who is a leader, who works well in
teams, who communicates well, and has an attitude of persevering. We’ve seen
that YouthBuild emcompasses
those characteristics.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Businessman Rodrigo Bolanos agrees that programs like this are
desperately needed if El Salvador is to begin to attract investment and rebuild
its economy.
RODRIGO BOLANOS: A lot of young people have not much to offer because they’re not
educated. You have communities where the gangs do not allow kids to go to
school and there’s really no opportunities for them whatsoever. If we want to
get our country back on its feet, we have to develop a way of teaching or of
educating our labor force.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And El Salvador must scale up such efforts, he says, given that
50% of the country’s six million people are below the age of 18. Even with the
planned expansion YouthBuild meets just a tiny
fraction of the need. And even when YouthBuild gets
students to enroll, the dropout rate is significant, according to director
Mena.
SARA MENA RAMOS: They drop out because of drug use or because they don’t really
know what they want or they come from completely dysfunctional families. This
current class started with 34 students but 14 dropped out.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: For those who stay, there is the possibility of a better life.
Jefferson Guevara is happy with his current job. But for him, as for El
Salvador, there are limits to the dream a program like YouthBuild
can provide.
JEFFERSON GUEVARA: I’d really like to go to the U.S.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Why is that?
JEFFERSON GUEVARA: Because I know in the U.S. I could move freely. There may be some
dangerous things, but not like here in El Salvador. I know in the U.S. you can
feel free.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: El Salvador remains a difficult, violent place to live, so it’s
not surprising that even for those on a path to a decent livelihood, the
journey north continues to loom large in the imagination of many young
Salvadorans.
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|
TIMECODE |
LOWER
THIRD |
1 |
0:23 |
SAN
SALVADOR FRED
DE SAM LAZARO SPECIAL
CORRESPONDENT |
2 |
1:07 |
SANDRA STUDENT |
3 |
1:16 |
FERNANDO STUDENT |
4 |
2:58 |
RICK
JONES YOUTHBUILD |
5 |
3:58 |
SARA
MENA RAMOS YOUTHBUILD |
6 |
4:49 |
JEFFERSON
DAVID GUEVARA YOUTHBUILD
GRADUATE |
7 |
5:24 |
CARLOS
GOMEZ SALVADORAN
VOCATIONAL TRAINING INSTITUTE |
8 |
5:57 |
RODRIGO
BOLANOS BUSINESSMAN |
9 |
6:44 |
SARA
MENA RAMOS YOUTHBUILD |