MGS: (Young People for Young People) January 2003 issue http://www.donboscoland.it/

Who are the truly poor young people?

That is the question we put to Fr Pascual Chávez, Rector Major of the Salesians of Don Bosco
Poor and marginalised youth have always been at the heart and life of the Salesian Family, from Don Bosco's time right up to the present day.

Don Bosco was neither a specialist scholar nor philosopher of education. Throughout his whole life, Don Bosco showed extraordinary intuition and great practical sense in his effort to come up with an answer to the ever increasing needs for assistance and education on the part of the young people who descended on Turin looking for work. His main goal was to prevent any initial or recurrent foul-ups in the lives of these young people by providing them with professional, moral and religious training. He started with nothing and built a huge construction which embodies those established reference points which were destined to be applied in that huge network of educational institutes which Paul VI defined as "the Salesian phenomenon".

After Don Bosco, the Salesian Congregation (today present in 126 countries throughout the world) has continued with that inspiring preventive criterion in a kaleidoscope of works and services on behalf of young people who are poor or social outcasts. Professional training and preparation for the world of work was so characteristic as to become, almost from the beginning, the identity card of the Salesians, and almost universally recognised as such.

In the last 30 years, the reality of poverty, especially where it affects young people, has become much more global and dramatic. This is a consequence of economic, cultural, structural and human factors, and it has developed into a culture of non-solidarity and exclusion.

Today in fact we speak of the new poverties young people experience. This refers to all those situations of abandonment in which they can find themselves or into which they can fall. Our constant conviction is that, until there is a change in this culture, we will not manage to overcome these poverties. The fact however still remains that socioeconomic is the most serious of these forms of poverty, because it is always preceded, accompanied and followed by other forms of poverty that are unimaginable. Here, as in so many other cases, unfortunately, the real situation is much worse than we imagine

Today's challenges

Here is a rapid mapping of the marginalisation and exploitation of young people round the world:

Street children and gangs

These young people have preferred to take to the streets as their natural "habitat" to escape a family situation they could put up with no more. They find themselves on a path that leads them, little by little, into crime (pickpocketing, robbery, aggression), drug addiction and trafficking, trying to survive with serious emotional and social needs, with no present and no future. On the streets of the big cities of Latin America, Africa and Asia, they live and die of cold, hunger and sickness. Some even are assassinated. There are almost 100 million of them in the world. A really impressive figure.

Child soldiers

It took two young people from Myanmar on the front cover of the chief magazines, with a machine gun in their hand and a cigarette in their mouth, for the world to discover something that has been going on for years and not just limited to Asia. We are talking about the recruiting of boys into the army, into guerrilla groups or as hired killers. They are under age, have no military training, and are simply in the killing business. They now number about 300,000, and are engaged in some of the riskiest war operations. Some of them are sent in, just like guinea pigs, to clear out minefields.

Abused children

One of the saddest situations, also for the stigma it casts on the victims, is the shameful business of paedophilia and so-called sex-tourism. Time and again child pornography networks are uncovered through the Internet. These are only the tip of the iceberg of sexual exploitation of children and adolescents. They mirror a very deep problem, the loss of any moral sense. According to UNICEF, each year a million children are introduced to the sex business, which is worth 13 billion dollars a year.

Child labourers and slaves

It is more than 150 years now since Don Bosco - and other lay and religious people clued into his time and his city - fought for the worker rights of minors and succeeded in getting them a work contract. There is a much greater awareness of the rights of minors, but there has also been an unbelievable increase in the number of children and teenagers exploited as tiny workers in inhuman conditions. It is reckoned that there are around 250 million children between the ages of five and fifteen, who are forced to do work that is forbidden on account of the physical, psychic or mental danger it involves. At times they are enslaved, and this more than a century after slavery was abolished by law.

The "nobodies"

One of the most traumatic experiences in anyone's life is the lost of their own family. This leaves the individual unexpectedly without their most important affective ties, those which generally give them a sense of security. It is as though a violent wind had swept their tent away and robbed them of all protection. Well then, there are about 50 million young people who are registered nowhere: they have no name, no home, no country, no parents. If we add to these the 130 million boys and girls who are illiterate, the picture is pretty bleak.

Children in prison

One of the areas in which Salesians and members of the Salesian Family have got involved has been the "correction" or reform of minors, even if their original vocation has always been to "prevent" and not "repress". Anyway, we know that at the origin of Don Bosco's Preventive System, the catalyst that pushed him to choose prevention was the tough experience he had as chaplain to the prisons in Turin, side by side with his teacher, Fr Joseph Cafasso. If this type of prison has a very negative effect on young people, we can imagine what happens when they are put in with people of every age, no matter what the offence or crime committed. There are so many, far too many. Even in the so-called civilised nations. Italy has about 500. Young people never come out of prison better. Quite the opposite! In the USA alone, there are 100,000 juveniles in prison.

Children forced to donate organs and those mutilated

Once the moral boundary is passed, it seems there are no limits for people and that everything, absolutely everything, is permitted. It is happening in the field of genetic engineering. Experiments are done on cells to produce substitute tissues and organs. And this happens in a far more cynical way in the trafficking in organs, one of the most shameful practices of our time. It is reckoned that 4,000,000 women and children are involved in this sordid affair, and at least 6,000,000 children are mutilated for various reasons.

Poor and marginalised children

These could easily not be listed in a category on their own. In fact, economic and social poverty is generally the cause of the other kinds of poverty. But it is true that there are young people who can be only be defined as poor and marginalised, deprived of access to all those goods to which every person has a right, in order to have a really human life. Their number exceeds all forecasts. More than 600 million children live below the poverty line, 160 million of them undernourished. Six million of them die of hunger each year: 17,000 a day, 708 each hour…

Children of the sewers / vagrants

Normally this means groups of street children, especially those who have started using drugs. Fear of being caught by the police or threats from stronger gangs of other young people, drives them to look for dens where they can hide. This happens in Latin America, but the same occurs in Europe: a thousand youngsters live in the sewers in Bucharest. There are more vagrants on the continent (France, Germany, Holland…). We are talking of at least a million. Worldwide there are about 12 million of them.

Sick children

Today, like never before, science and techology, especially in the field of medicine, have been able to succeed and achieve what we now count on. That means the conditions now exist to conquer many illnesses. Despite that, every minute on the five continents five children contract AIDS. Almost 11 million minors have contracted the virus. How many children, then, suffer from tuberculosis, malaria, meningitis, hepatitis, cholera, ebola?…

Young refugees and orphans

There are many ways in which violence forces many young people, even children and adolescents, to emigrate and seek refuge. I came across groups of adolescents from Honduras at the borders of the United States after a journey that was full of risks. I came across them in Colombia, "displaced by guerrilla warfare" or left orphans after great disasters and sicknesses. I saw them in Africa. There are more than 50 million child refugees and/or victims of racial hatred, wars and persecutions, crowded into refugee camps or scattered here and there. Very many of them are orphans: in Africa 13 million of them have been left orphaned by AIDS.

The children ...

So much misfortune prods people's consciences. At the end of the 25th General Chapter, the Salesians made an appeal to all those responsible for young people: "Before it is too late, let us save young people, the future of the world." This is my appeal, as the successor of Don Bosco, the friend of youth, right here from Rome, the centre of Western culture and civilisation.

Faced with such a sorry panorama of the sores plaging the world of youth, we Salesians "are on the side of young people, because—like Don Bosco—we have confidence in them, in their will to learn, to study, to overcome poverty, to take their future into their own hand… We are on the side of young people, because we believe in the value of the person, in the possibility of a different world, and above all in the great value of the work of education". Let us invest in youth! Let us globalise the effort to provide education and let us in this way prepare a positive future for the whole world.

The Salesian answer today

Perhaps you will ask me: "But concretely what are the Salesians doing today to solve this burning issue"?

First of all we are aware that in the meantime, thanks to people of great moral fibre, many institutions have been established and their members have generously and with admirable dedication created works and services of assistance, education and recovery as an answer to the situations of marginalisation we have already mentioned. In this way they contribute to the promotion of what John Paul II calls "the culture of life and solidarity". Christian humanism and inter-religious humanism have joined forces with secular humanism, to pool their energies and come up with a new definition of the educational coordinates and the practical decisions needed to promote what Don Bosco called "that part of human society which is so exposed and yet so rich in promise," viz. youth.

The Salesian Congregation is also playing its part in this work, bringing the riches of the educational method it inherited from Don Bosco, his well-known Preventive System.

In this System the primary concern is to get in before evil using education. As I have already indicated, poverty and marginalisation are not only an economic phenomenon, but a reality that touches people's mentality and that of society itself, and affects people's way of seeing and picturing life. Education is, consequently, a fundamental element in preventing and overcoming marginalisation. Through education, the Preventive System wants to help young people rebuild their own personal identity, bring new life to the values they have not managed to develop and expand on precisely because of their marginalised situation, and discover reasons for living with meaning, joy, responsibility and competence.

Hand in hand with that, Don Bosco's Preventive System has a great social outreach. It wishes to collaborate with many other agencies to transform society, working to change criteria and outlooks on life. It wants to promote the culture of 'the other', of a simple life style, of a constant attitude of sharing freely and of fighting for justice and the dignity of every human life.

Furthermore, this System has the decisive belief that the religious dimension of people is their deepest and most significant riches, and for this reason it tries, as the ultimate goal of all its proposals, to direct each young person towards the realisation of their vocation as a child of God. I think this is one of the most important contributions Don Bosco's Preventive System can offer in the field of the education of children, adolescents and young people in a situation of poverty and psychosocial risk.

Don Bosco wanted to achieve this, and to this end he transform all his educational works into real and proper houses—that is how he wanted them to be called, at a time when "Family-Homes", today so widespread, and including Don Bosco Town, did not exist. In his houses, young people were able to experience precisely a family atmosphere, and enter actively into a network of genuine and significant interpersonal relations, and in this way develop their ability to participate and their natural creativity. This is what we call "an educative community", where both educators and the young people themselves gradually share the values and goals of the educative project and commit themselves to their realisation.

I do not know whether there really is a need for a new international order or whether it is more a lack of good governance. But it is certain that the great macrocosmic problems are resolved in the microcosm of our life and our educational works. That is where alternative proposals are conceived and grow.

Don Bosco's answer at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in the second half of the 19th century, was not by way of an academic debate, a sterile research for corrective theories for a difficult situation, but in his pastoral ingenuity to get out on the streets, welcome the boys who came from the country and who were exposed to being exploited, to draw up work contracts with employers that safeguarded these young people's rights, to himself organise training workshops to bring them up to the level where they could earn their bread honestly, and, above all, to offer them an educative experience that would give them the ability to face life with some guarantee of success.

Following this shining example, today there are hundreds of Salesians, members of the Salesian Family, educators, animators, pedagogists, psychologists, volunteers who work on behalf of young workers, adolescent soldiers, children exploited by sex tourism, street children. Times have changed, the dangers, the risks, the needs of minors have changed. The educative models and intervention strategies have to change as well.

We are talking, I said, of a clear and significant experience of solidarity, directed to form—and these are Don Bosco's own words—"honest citizens and good Christians", that is, builders of the city, people who are active and responsible, aware of their dignity, with life projects, open to transcendence, to other people and to God.

Our different experiences of working with the marginalised worldwide have value as a "sign" of an educative proposal at the service of young people, and of an alternative proposal for society, and they will really help put a human face on globalisation if we are capable of creating people who live solidarity and promote networks of solidarity.

I FINISH WITH THE FINAL WORDS OF THE APPEAL TO SAVE THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE WORLD:

"Together let everybody globalise the commitment to education! This is a task for all men and women with a sense of responsibilty who have at heart the future of their own children and that of all the young people of the world. Let us try to respond to globalisation of an economic type with globalisation of an educative sort, which will give vigour and hope to the world of youth."

Fr Pascual Chávez Villanueva