Childhood should be Sacred
Some 850,000,000 people across the world will be hungry when they go to bed tonight. 6,000,000 children will die next year from hunger and malnutrition. Famine and wars cause just 10% of hunger deaths, 90% is due to poverty. In Indonesia 40% of the population lives below the poverty line, that's around 90,000,000 people, which means a lot of hungry children.
Childhood is a very special time in everyone's life that should be free from trauma, violence and abuse. A good childhood prepares and enables us to deal with stress and difficulties in adulthood more effectively, it creates an enquiring mind that will lead to increased democracy, it makes for better parents in the next generation, and more loving and accepting communities in the future. It should be a time when we are allowed to develop and grow, when we feel deeply loved and cared for." says Natalia Perry, the English-born director of Sacred Childhoods, a Bali-based NGO dedicated to improving the educational and social levels of disadvantaged children both here and across Indonesia.
Sacred Childhoods is a hands-on organisation that evaluate and address the most pressing issues facing children and helps educate, feed, shelter and protect those who are the most vulnerable. Sacred Childhoods' team of dedicated staff and volunteers is currently working across Indonesia, an area of South East Asia crippled by poverty and corruption.
They help to combat hunger and exploitation by evaluating orphanages and children's projects in Indonesia to understand whether they are able to provide regular food and water to the children. Many of the children's projects are run by local people of the community on a shoestring budget and if donations fail to come in some months, the children literally starve.
They are active in the fight against HIV/ AIDS and have a constant stream of volunteer doctors and nurses who travel around Indonesia offering basic treatments and advice to some of the communities that are totally cut off from medical support. Medical volunteers also help to raise awareness of the need to use condoms in the fight against the disease.
Sacred Childhoods supports projects where the children have been rescued from slavery and exploitation. Many of these children suffered torture and abuse and have lost contact with their families from which they were taken. Their volunteers take the children on trips back to their original villages and reunite them with their families. The children then return to the projects that rescued them to finish their education before once again returning home. Sacred Childhoods also arranges for trips to the zoo and other fun days out; after the existence that these children have led previously, they think they are in heaven. They have an office in Ubud which acts as not only the organizations head quarters but also community centre, yoga and meditation venue and home for a local former homeless woman and her three kids. Increasingly, Sacred Childhoods would like to set up safe houses to accommodate children previously held as slaves for child labour, exploitation or child prostitution. Sacred Childhoods also operates street schools in Indonesia including Kuta Beach where the children can voluntarily come to learn, and two meals are provided to replace the food that they would otherwise be searching for or earning.
A Change in Thinking
There has been a huge shift in tourism of late whereby foreigners are choosing to get involved in aid projects to help those less fortunate than themselves in developing countries. Instead of lying on the beach or touring ancient ruins by the busload, these people get down in the dirt building clinics, digging wells, or even teaching English to children. Sacred Childhoods welcomes such volunteers who can offer either financial or hands on help and run many programmes where people can help directly. "Knowing how to help and where to start is really difficult and Sacred Childhoods is here to bridge the gap between Westerners who want to get involved in helping and the children who need the help," explains Natalia.
Resolving world poverty is a massive, complicated and difficult task which overwhelms most people; the rich can argue forever about why they should protect their assets. But who can argue about the needs of a child? We all know that children are born into situations that they can't escape from, so when any one is faced with a horrific story of a group of children suffering there should be no argument to be had.
"Change on a global scale can be achieved by way of a collected shift of mindset: these are not just someone else's children, someone else's responsibility," says Natalia. "If we each take responsibility, if we each commit to giving a little of our time and of ourselves, the world's children can be given their childhoods back."
For more information on how you can make a difference go to www.sacredchildhoods.org
