info about volunteer organization in Quito

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Background on CENIT
CENIT, El Centro de la Niña Trabajadora, or the Center for the Working Girl as it is known in English, is a non-governmental, non-profit organization devoted to helping working children, and especially working girls, and their families overcome grinding poverty and improve their quality of lives through education and job training, nutrition programs, health and social services, psychological help, and recreation. CENIT welcomes people from all religions or creeds and offers educational, psychological, and medical programs, as well as job training, to working children and their families. Its hope is that with these services, the children and their families might improve their quality of life. CENIT complies with all the requirements of Ecuadorian law with regards to charities and is registered with the Ministry of Social Health. CENIT is situated in the south of Quito, near to the Camal Market, and is well positioned to help some of the poorest families in Quito. The majority of the children have suffered from various types of abuse, be it psychological, physical or sexual. As a result they often have deep-rooted problems. We at CENIT are of the belief that in order to achieve a real change in the life of any individual, it is necessary to work with the child, his or her family, and the community. As a result, despite the fact that CENIT's title is "The Center for the Working Girl", CENIT helps children and family members regardless of gender, although it continues to place special emphasis on helping female children due to the fact that they tend to have a disproportionately large workload. CENIT is able to be effective due to the variety of programs we have, all of which confront the problems of working children, each with a different emphasis.

Who Started and Who Runs CENIT?
The Sisters of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic order, founded CENIT in 1991 in response to their observations that the prevalence of child laborers in Quito had increased greatly due to urban migration, debt crisis, and an increase in poverty. They sought to give these children the necessary skills, talents, and education so that they could find work away from the streets and hopefully break the cycle of child laborers. Over fifteen years later, CENIT continues to be run by a group of nuns from the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. These nuns work in conjunction with about 35 Ecuadorian paid professionals (including teachers, administrators, psychologists and social workers), and around fifty foreign and national volunteers in order to locate the child workers, befriend them and their families, and eventually integrate them into an educational program.

Who Does CENIT Help?
CENIT helps working children, their families, and members of the extended community. The community health clinic provides general health services to about 2000 patients every year. The schools give educational and life skills to around 250 children per year, many of whom would not otherwise have the opportunity. The street outreach program helps over 190 children and parents by bringing educational recourses to the streets, and our drop-in-tutoring center (CEA) provides tutoring to about 70 children, helping them integrate into the school system.

What are Working Children?
Working children are those under the age of 18 who work full or part-time. The working children in Ecuador, and specifically in Quito, generally work as ambulatory vendors (selling vegetables, fruits, or candy), shoe shines, entertainers on busses and in markets, and laborers. Often, children start out working by their mother's side in markets, but normally by the age of 4 or 5 they become more ambulatory and work increasingly alone or in groups of children.

Why Are There Working Children?
The epidemic of children working has been present throughout time, but certain economic and social factors have made this problem more prevalent in Ecuador since the 1980s. Whereas most "developed" countries have instituted and reinforced social reforms prohibiting child labor, many developing countries do not have the means to make the necessary legal changes or resources to enforce these changes in order to curb the problem of child labor. Provoked by the debt crisis of the 1980s and urban migration, working children have become an increasingly common sight on the streets of most Latin American cities. Many are the children of poor parents from the countryside who have migrated to the cities to look for work and dreaming of opportunity.

What Problems Do Working Children Face?
Working children face a myriad of problems. First, because they spend most of their lives working on the street, they are much more vulnerable than non-working children to sexual and physical assaults by strangers, gang pressure, the temptations to steal, prostitution, health problems from working on the street (such as poor-hygiene induced problems such as scabies and lice, malnutrition, lack of access to clean water, problems with parasites and diarrea, sleep deprivation and environment stresses), and drug addiction. The children, who generally live with their family and work on the street and in the markets, suffer from many problems. In the majority of families CENIT works with, the problem of mistreatment and abuse is rampant. Many children are physically, emotionally, and/or sexually abused by their family members, members of their extended family, or neighbors. The high incidence of alcoholism among recent male migrants magnifies this problem. Often, the families set specific quotas for the children which determine how much they have to sell each day. If the child does not meet this quota, he or she could be subject to severe, often physical, punishment. In some cases, working children resort to petty theft in order to come home with enough money so that they are not beaten. Most working children do not get a basic education. The poverty of most families with working children is so extreme that the parents worry more about day-to-day survival than making a future investment in their children by providing them with education. Besides the missed income, another reason the parents are unable or unwilling to send their children to school is that school is not free. Parents in Ecuador have to pay a fee to educate their children, even in public schools, and often have to pay between $100 and $400 for mandatory enrolment fees and school supplies, such as uniforms. For a poor family that counts pennies in order to survive, sacrificing half, or sometimes more, of their annual income for education is not a possibility.
Do Working Children All Live on the Streets?
Contrary to popular belief, most working children live at home with their families or extended families. There are children who do live and work on the street, but the majority of working children in Ecuador do, in fact, live with their families. Most of the families live in dire conditions, sometimes without running water or sanitary services such as bathrooms.

What Do Working Children Do?
Working children do any low-skilled job that they can in order to help their families survive. For example, many children work as ambulatory vendors or in low skilled jobs such as peeling potatoes, shining shoes, and selling candy. For this reason, many of them have not had the mental stimulation to be at the level of intellectual development that their non-working peers easily obtain. Also, many of them do such mundane, repetitive jobs (such as peeling potatoes), that they also have not developed proper motor skills.

What CENIT Families Are Like
Economic Situation
The families with whom CENIT works are some of the poorest in Quito and Ecuador. Many of the families are very large. Some have up to 11 or 12 living children; the majority of the families have around six children. Their average monthly income for the entire family is between $130 and $140 dollars. Their children work because often that is the only way for the family to support themselves economically. The families believe that, in order to survive, their children must work.

Education
Many of our parents do not know how to read, and of those who can read, many struggle just to read basics, such as street signs. Since the primary goal of impoverished families is survival and in previous generations education was not a priority, the trend of putting immediate survival above future success is inherited from generation to generation. The majority of parents who have had some education have only attended a few years of grade school. Their children do not go to school regularly, because the parents believe that it is much more imperative that the children work to earn an income to help ensure survival of the family.

General Health
The majority of health problems that the CENIT community faces are easily prevented or cured with basic medical attention and relatively inexpensive medicines; however, it is very difficult for many families to receive these basic services. Often, a person cannot go to a hospital or a health center because it takes so much time away from working. For almost all public health services in Ecuador, patients must arrive by at least 6 o’clock in the morning in order to get a appointment to see the doctor or, if the hospital does not offer appointments every day, the patient will have to wait all day in the hope that they might get in to see the doctor. For some services, the patient has to get an appointment the day before. This means that one doctor visit could result in 1 to 3 days of lost income. If they do get an appointment, they then have to pay for it, which generally is between $.40 and $10, depending on the service. Many of our patients do not have an extra $5 to sacrifice for the doctor. Also, services such as sonograms for pregnant women cost around $10, meaning that many women do not receive prenatal care or comprehensive prenatal care. In general, CENIT has learned that the best way to deal with the problems of health care in Ecuador is to educate through campaigns about prevention and to provide primary care.

Reproductive Health
Most of the families we work with are extremely large. Many of the fathers do not live full-time with their children, and most of the mothers have children with a number of different men. Because of the lack of access to medical services and a dire lack of sexual education, many women do not use a method of family planning, or begin to use a method of family planning when they already have a number of children (5 or more.) The most frequently used method of family planning in Ecuador is female sterilization (or tubal ligation). Because of misconceptions, a lack of education, and machismo, the majority of men does not have vasectomies or use condoms. Also, because of the aforementioned reasons, many of the men do not want their wives or girlfriends to use a form of birth control because they believe that by using birth control the women will cheat on them and be free to sleep with as many men as possible. Also, in terms of families' reproductive health, it is important to note that the majority of the women over age 20 in Ecuador receive Sexually Transmitted Infections or Diseases from their cheating spouses or partners.

Hygiene
CENIT's community generally suffers from a very low level of basic hygiene. They lack knowledge about the necessary measures that need to be taken to care for themselves. They also lack access to sanitation, running water, and a way to boil water. The lack of hygiene causes more than just aesthetic problems. In Ecuador, the most common killer of children under the age of five is diarrhea: most diarrhea comes from hygiene problems that allow parasitic infestation, or from contaminated water. In addition to digestive problems, our community also suffers from skin problems, such as scabies, lice, fungus, dry skin, eczema, and infected cuts. Also, many members of the community suffer from respiratory infections because of breathing in bus fumes while working on the street, or because of using crude fuels to cook.

Nutrition
The majority of CENIT children are extremely malnourished. For example, in our kindergarten, over half of the children are in the bottom fifth percentile of height and weight. Diarrhea magnifies these problems, causing the children to lose much of the nutrition they have received through frequent trips to the bathroom. Malnutrition contributes to the low intellectual capacity a number of our children demonstrate. Also, all of the girls in our high school suffer from some degree of anemia.

Alcohol and Drug Use
Alcoholism is common among our parents, and worsens the problem of abuse, maltreatment, and neglect. For working children, the drug of choice tends to be inhalants, such as sniffing glue, which alleviates hunger pains and lessens the cold.

Abuse
Unfortunately, we can confidently say that 100% of our children are victims of sexual, physical, verbal, or emotional abuse at homes. We believe that the fact that the parents are subjecting the children to a life working on the street, vulnerable to the world at an extremely young age, denying them of any educational opportunity, is perhaps the most shocking form of abuse of all.

CENIT's Methodology
There are several advantages to CENIT's methodology. First, we have volunteers participating in street outreach every weekday, year-round. This allows us to accurately identify which children are working, and to bond with their families. This also enables us to get a realistic impression of how many working children regularly attend school. Once we form relationships with the kids and their families, we then try to convince the parents to send their kids to school. We facilitate this process either by accompanying them when they enrol their students in other area schools, or we help them enrol in CENIT. For those families who are still hesitant about enrolling their children in school, we are able to convince them to enrol their children in CENIT because our school is specifically structured to help working children. While normal schools in Ecuador have 6 years of basic (elementary) education and 6 years of colegio (high school) education, CENIT condenses both the elementary and high school into three years each, allowing children to complete two years of study every school year. Parents of working children, who often do not want to send their children to school because they fear their family will not be able to survive financially without the child’s income, are often persuaded to send their children to CENIT because they will be sacrificing the added income for a decreased amount of time. Another benefit to CENIT's program is that it has very flexible age limits. For example, in the 1st year of ESTAR, the elementary school, there are children enrolled between the age of 8 and 15. Having flexible age limits enables children who have never been in school before, or have been out of school for a considerable amount of time, to attend school. CENIT also combines a traditional education with a vocational center, which teaches useful skills such as carpentry, sewing, cosmetology, baking, and card making. We teach the children these skills so that if they are unable to continue studies, they will at least have usable skills that will qualify them for work off the streets. The final reason our program works is because the students’ parents must participate in CENIT through various programs we offer for the parents, such as the Parent’s School, a program run by the social workers and psychologist that provides the parents with monthly information sessions and workshops on a variety of topics ranging from family planning to alternative forms of punishment to nutrition.
Why is CENIT Referred to as the Center for the Working Girl as Opposed to the Center for the Working Child?
CENIT is called “The Center for the Working Girl” because its founders attempted to specifically address the problems of working girls. Often, working girls live in much harsher conditions than working boys. For example, they are much more susceptible to abuse, rape, and sexual assault. Also, they are much more likely to be malnourished because often in families the mother will feed the father and the sons, and then the daughters, and then (if there is still food), herself. The daughters are also much less likely than the sons to receive education, because if a family has any money to send a child to school, they will send a male child with the belief that educating him would be a better investment. Also, while most working children work between 8-12 hours a day, girls will work an extra 6 to 8 hours because they must help out with the household and domestic chores. For this reason, CENIT’s founders felt it was especially important to help girls. However, it is also important to note that these same founders realized that girls are part of a larger social structure comprised of both male and female citizens. They realized that a girl’s family is comprised of the same way, and know that if the goal is truly for a girl to succeed, her whole family must do so as well. For this reason, CENIT accepts those boys that are related to the girls in our program, through work or family, as eligible participants as well.

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