Andrea Burniske's blog

These girls, participants in Mercy Corps' Spaces to Grow Program in Santander, Colombia, participate in sports activities for the International Day of Peace. Photo: Andrea Burniske/Mercy Corps

The kids from our southern Santander, Colombia alternative classrooms are rural poor: their parents work their small plots of land, too often sacrificing their kids' education for help with crops and chores. Often in this area, as in so many rural zones in Colombia, picking coca for armed groups is a higher-paying alternative to other kinds of work and agriculture.

The kids in Mercy Corps' Spaces to Grow are at high risk for becoming involved in this kind of work. The Spaces to Grow are alternative classrooms that help kids who have fallen behind at school because of working to catch up with their studies. The farther behind the kids get, the lower their self-esteem in school, and the more likely they are to leave school altogether — to do whatever offers them a living wage.

The kids in the Spaces to Grow come from very vulnerable families — families in which there is often a lot of violence toward the kids and between the adults. We really noticed this from focus groups in other cities, and were told that this is a real problem also in Santander.

Vivo Jugando is a new Mercy Corps sports-for-change strategy that uses soccer and yoga to work through important issues such as domestic violence and sexual exploitation to give kids tools to deal with these issues in their lives. We started using Vivo Jugando in Santander a couple of months ago. The kids are wild about it, as you can see from this video:

Here they are playing with a 'globe' ball, a donation from Mercy Corps' Scotland office to celebrate the Intenational Day of Peace. These kinds of experiences are so important for kids — so they understand ideas of peace, cooperation for a better community and feel supported and cared for by people they respect. Without these things, the people they respect are going to be people who they see as having power — the armed groups and drug traffickers.

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